Re: Restoring a pilot

[Adam C Powell IV <hazelsct debian org>]

On Tue, 2004-04-20 at 18:23, David A. Desrosiers wrote:
> > There are two points here.  First, there's no way in gnome-pilot (that I
> > could find) to restore a pilot.  Second, it's very easy for someone to
> > lose a LOT of important data by doing things wrong.
> 
> 	I'm interested to understand the use-case scenarios where someone
> could "lose" their data doing these things wrong. You had a blank Palm, and
> wanted to restore existing Palm data to it, from the desktop. How would you
> lose data there? Backing up the blank Palm to your desktop, instead of going
> from Desktop -> Palm?

Indeed, that's exactly what I did.  I clicked to have the old ID and
name transferred to the new Palm, then hotsynced via normal gpilotd,
thinking that it would sync the old stuff into the new Palm.  But the
backup conduit (which was all I used) mostly copied the empty pdbs from
the new Palm into the directory, overwriting the old full ones.  I was
spared from total loss by having the backup tarball.

Curiously, some of the databases transferred correctly from the desktop
to the Palm, like the datebook, Blazer cache, and a couple of games. 
But the contacts, memos, todos, and a couple of others were wiped out.

> 	We should begin to understand them, so we can build in some
> protections to prevent users from losing data or destroying the ability to
> function with their devices (i.e. restoring a T3 backup to a Palm IIIc for
> example).

Ooh, great idea, to the extent that it's possible...  Sounds good.

> > Okay, rant over.  I would be willing to participate in design and coding
> > to make restoring a PalmOS device possible in g-p, time permitting, and if
> > there is interest here...
> 
> 	There is some very interesting work going on right now that will
> soon make this painfully easy (oo, bad choice of words, but..)
> 
> 	Here is one example of that design, as a proposed first-pass:
> 
> 	http://code.pilot-link.org/future_design.png

Wow, outstanding.  Thanks for the link!

-Adam P.

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