The good and not-so-good of Palm Backup

So today I finally got tired of my Pre crashing more and more often when I closed the slider too hard or looked at it the wrong way, so I stopped by the local Sprint store to get a phone swap. By some miracle they had just received their day’s shipment and were more than happy to perform the exchange once I demonstrated the pathetic screen fading death. I had no problem with deciding to do the exchange, I had taken the time to manually perform a backup beforehand using the Backup app on the Pre. So when it came time to get started with the new device, I knew I was going to have to port back over my pictures and music, but my Palm Profile would have all of my applications and settings stored for easy retrieval. For all the times I’d completely restored my Treo from a backup, I was left disappointed by the present implementation of Palm Backup.

As you may recall, when you activate a Pre you have to create a Palm Profile for backups and remote wipe management, among other services. Backup is advertised as being able the remotely restore your applications and settings. But that’s not entirely the case. It will restore your Synergy settings (and subsequently sync everything back down from Google and Facebook’s servers) and your applications, but your application settings? You can kiss those goodbye.

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