trouble restoring databases

[Larry Siden <lsiden gmail com>]

Last week all my Pilot databases got erased when the batteries went
dead.  No biggie.  I have gnome-pilot installed, and tried to do a
sync (I took the precaution of telling all the conduits to copy data
from the PC to the Palm - actually, a Visor).  The sync started fine,
but midway through, while copying the address book db, the Visor pops
up a message that says I need to do a reset to continue syncing, and
displays a button that does so.  Meanwhile, gnome-pilot on the PC acts
like it doesn't know anything about this and continues waiting for the
Visor to respond.

After several attempts at this, I decided to restore from backups
using pilot-xfer.  These all exist in a directory called ~/MyPilot. 
I'm guessing that the contents were placed there over time by the
backup conduit.  So I ran pilot-xfer -r MyPilot.  Two things:
pilot-xfer immediately complains that it can't open the directory
MyPilot/0 (believe me, it's there, and I have permission to open it). 
Then it finishes immediately, saying that the sync is complete, as if
it can't find anything to do.  Nonsense!

Can anyone tell me what I need to do to restore my databases?

-- 
Larry Siden
http://umich.edu/~lsiden/