SPB Software House Spb Backup review

It's hugely beneficial to keep regular backups of your Pocket PC data on an SD or CF storage card, in addition to your usual ActiveSync backups.

Not only are card backups faster to restore than via ActiveSync, in our experience they're more reliable too. We've been unable to restore from ActiveSync on more than one occasion. Add to this that you can be back in action within minutes if you're unlucky enough to experience a hard reset while away from your desk, and the idea becomes compelling.

Until now, Sprite Backup (www.spritesoftware.com) was the best option for those without card backup software bundled with their handheld. Spb Software House, one of the most prolific Pocket PC software houses, has just entered the market with the first version of its own backup software. It's very capable, and it is $10 (around £7) cheaper than Sprite Backup. In terms of speed it's comparable with Sprite Backup, taking less than five minutes to back up or restore the entire memory contents of a 128MB handheld.

Spb Backup works by creating a single self-extracting file containing an entire backup image. As well as performing a full restore of a wiped handheld, taking it back to where you were at the point of the last backup, there's the option to restore only PIM data, emails, the contents of your My Documents folder or system details. This isn't as flexible as Sprite Backup, which lets you choose your restore options down to individual file level, but it's still adequate for most users.

To save you the trouble of having to remember to back up every day, the software allows you to set up a completely automated backup regime, running in the middle of the night if you wish, then automatically performing a soft reset at the end, which is a requirement of all Pocket PC backup programs. It even includes a neat Today screen plug-in that displays the time of the last and next scheduled backups. Most important for any backup software, it appears to be very reliable. We tried a number of forced resets while testing Spb Backup, and it restored all our data perfectly every time.