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BackupMan
March 12, 2003
BackupMan is another utlity from Bits ‘n Bolts Software, the developer of the Embark launcher for the Palm OS that I reviewed yesterday. And in keeping with the simple elegance and ease of use, BackupMan is another great application, and its importance is obvious— the more we rely on our handhelds, the more careful we need to be about backing up our data. Backup Man provides an all in one solution that simply can’t be beat, for a number of reasons. As you can see from the screen shot below, it isn’t all that complicated. Simply tap the “Backup” button to back up every application and data file on your device to a memory card, such as an SD card on the Palm Tungsten T or a Memory Stick on a Sony Clie. If you want to be really sure that you never lose an important piece of data, you can schedule backups to occur at a predetermined time (I have my Tungsten setp to backup every morning at 3:23 AM), hourly, and even after every HotSync. You can also tell the program how many backup sets you want to keep, and you don’t have to worry about having enough space on your memory card. If you don’t, Backup Man will automatically abort, instead of trying and hanging right in the middle of the operation. When it comes to restoration, you have two choices— either restore the entire device, as in the case of a hard reset, nr restore individual files (in case you did something idiotic and really messed up a ShadowPlan outline, for example). I tried a complete restoration on my Tungsten, and it performed perfectly.So how does BackupMan stack up against Backup Buddy VFS, the longtime leader in this area? Backup Man is much faster, taking only 62 seconds to backup my entire Tungsten (which has only 2MB of RAm free); BBVFS took 2 minutes, 9 seconds. BackupMan also provides compression, so backing up 14MB of data takes only 10MB per backup set on my SD card, while BBVFS does not offer compression at all. Lastly, BackupMan is fully compatible with Palm OS5, while BBVFS is not— BackupMan does not include the “68K files” that PACE creates on the Tungsten. While you can use BBVFS to back up an OS5 device, it should not be used to automatically and complete restore an OS5 device— at best you can use a file manager to copy individual files back to RAM. The only feature BackupMan is lacking in comparison to BBVFS is the ability to leave certain files out of the backup sets. That makes sense in some ways, since if you have it on your device it’s probably important enough to back up. But in the case of my Pocket TV Browser database, which is 1.4MB in size, or perhaps large Avantgo files that really aren’t mission critical, it would be very nice if they could be easily excluded. BackupMan is fast enough to back up everything very quickly, so that isn’t an issue, but it would be nice to save that much more space on the memory card, so that you can get one more MP3 music file on there, for example.
BackupMan is another great utility from Bits ‘n Bolts that I don’t plan to ever be without. It is simple, elegant, and full-featured. You can get a free trial of BackupMan at the Bits ‘n Bolts web site, and you can also purchase it for $10.00. It’s well worth the money, especially if you travel often and simply can’t afford to lose even a bit of your data. You can always restore everything by Hotsyncing with your computer, but you can’t always do that immediately. Get BackupMan and you won’t ever have to worry about your data again.
PocketGoddess rating for BackupMan: 
