Dear James,

Greetings from New Delhi, India

I read your review of SPB Backup, on Computing Unplugged. It seems you have missed a very important point.

What is the use of SPB Backup if your device gets stolen. It seems that, for restoring the files, you have to buy another device of the same model having the same ROM. With the knowledge that the Pocket PC devices get obsolete with in 3-4 months of purchasing, who would like to invest in the same Pocket PC model.

I think the true benefit of a backup software would be if it gives you power to restore the data on any future Pocket PC model, irrespective of the company and the ROM.

Thanks

Dr Nishith Chandra

Thank you for reading Computing Unplugged Magazine, Dr. Chandra, and thank you as well for your letter. You bring up a very valid point. One of the shortcomings of all backup solutions is that they all only work on the device model that was backed up.

Perhaps a word of explanation are in order...

As our current technology stands, it is impossible to restore a backup from one device model onto another. The reason is that in order to obtain a full and complete backup of the entire device and its settings, the registry must be copied. And the settings within that registry are unique to each device. The settings and entries for an HP iPaq will not match the settings and the entries for a Cingular 8525.

Even in the enterprise setting, where multiple devices are cloned, all with the exact same setup, they must all be the same device model. Not even a clone application can deploy identical settings among different device models.

It's the same with our PCs. You can't pull the hard drive out of your old computer, put it in a new one, and expect the new system to boot up from the old hard drive; it won't, and for the very same reason. The information about the memory, the processor, the operating system, the BIOS, everything about that system, is stored in the registry of that hard drive. And for that reason, it won't boot on a different system.

Unfortunately, until either our technology changes, or the manner in which it is deployed, our backups will only be good for the device model on which they were made.

[One thing to keep in mind: this is where HotSync and ActiveSync are important. If you also backup to your PC using HotSync or ActiveSync, then you can (with some difficulty, but it's doable) restore to a different PDA. You've got to restore a Palm OS PDA to a Palm OS PDA and a Pocket PC to a Pocket PC, but you don't have to restore to the same model. -- DG]

I hope by sharing this letter and information with our readers, it will take some of the mystery out of how our devices operate.

James Booth is Editor-at-Large at ZATZ Publishing. In addition to writing for Computing Unplugged and Connected Photographer, he's the author of Do-It-Yourself Wedding Photography. A self-taught photographer, James also dabbles in digital graphics and has learned to be a PC and handheld specialist through personal trial and error. James can be reached at jbooth@zatz.com.