Mike Waldron of Bits & Bolts has told me that to date, they haven't charged for any major upgrades. They just prefer to keep the option open in the event that a major upgrade results in a complete reworking of the software, with vastly different features. In essence, what amounts to a completely new application.

FlyBackUp v1.7
Next on the fight card we have FlyBackUp from the curiously named FlyZip. Yeah, that's what I thought, too. Like BackupMan, FlyBackUp is a handheld-only backup app.

FlyBackUp, in Figure D, requires Palm OS 4.0 or higher, and has native support for OS 5.

FIGURE D


FlyBackUp from FlyZip is competitor number two in our shootout. Roll over picture for a larger image.

It features support for devices with multiple cards, i.e. Tapwave Zodiac. It allows you to choose which of those expansion cards to use for your backups, and what percentage of the card to dedicate for backup use. You can even specify different cards for manual and automated backups. Figure E shows the many backup options available with FlyBackUp.

FIGURE E


You can see here all the backup options available with FlyBackUp. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Speaking of automated. FlyBackUp offers fully automated, set and forget, scheduled backups. The backups can be scheduled daily, weekly, monthly, or on user specified time intervals. FlyBackUp also features full encryption with password protection. It retails for $9.95 through the FlyZip site.

BackupBuddy
BackupBuddy from Blue Nomad, our final contender, comes in two flavors, BackupBuddy, the desktop application for backing up your handheld, shown in Figure F, and BackupBuddyVFS, the handheld backup application. Both are standalone applications and not dependent on one another.

FIGURE F


BackupBuddy backs up your handheld to your desktop PC. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The BackupBuddy desktop application is currently PC specific and operates through a Hotsync conduit. It defaults as the last conduit so that if any changes are made to your device during a sync, they'll be recorded in the backup.

The purpose of this piece really isn't to do a full-blown review of the desktop application, so I'm only going to touch on it lightly, then move on to BackupBuddyVFS.

The BackupBuddy desktop application lets you do multiple backups of the data and applications on your Palm handheld. You can then go back and restore single applications or data, or do an all or nothing. It also keeps multiple backups on record, so that if do another backup after installing a system killer, you can do a restore from a prior backup.

BackupBuddy also comes with a free copy of TimeSync and BackupBuddyVFS Personal. TimeSync will keep the system time of your handheld synched to the system time of your desktop. BackupBuddyVFS Personal is a lite version of BackupBuddyVFS Professional. It allows you to do an all or nothing backup of your handheld, no individual file selection. The BackupBuddy desktop application retails for $29.95.

BackupBuddyVFS Professional
BackupBuddyVFS Professional, in Figure G, is the handheld-only version of BackupBuddy, and is a completely new version, just recently released.