Palm Pre hit by corrupt backups

Posted on 26 Nov 2009 at 10:09

A substantial number of users of the Palm Pre phone have lost all their data, after they tried to restore it from backup.

Pre Central reports that the data losses occurred when users either reset or replaced their handset only to find that their online Palm Profile backup had become corrupted.

The website says that its inbox has been “flooding” with instances of data loss, but Palm said in a statement that only a few users have been affected.

“We are seeing a small number of customers who have experienced issues transferring their Palm Profile information to another Palm webOS device. Palm and Sprint [the Pre’s mobile network] are working closely together to support these customers to successfully transfer their information to the new device.”

But Pre Central says the problem has been around ever since the Pre was introduced in the summer.

“At present, with no resolution in sight we cannot in good conscience recommend that you trust your data to Palm’s servers. While we have little choice with tasks and memos (unless you want to pay to sync them through desktop clients like The Missing Sync), your contacts and calendar data should be kept in the cloud with Google or Yahoo.”

Where, as the website notes, you can go online to check that the data is as it should be, something that is not possible with the Palm Profile.

This latest incident of Cloud failure highlights the wisdom of Apple’s approach, whereby the iPhone (or iPod touch) is backed up locally each time you connect it to iTunes, but data can also be stored online.

Author: Simon Aughton

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