New Buddy System for Mac Palm Users -- Nearly every Palm organizer owner suffers from the terror of activating his or her handheld and discovering all its data has been wiped out. Devices are regularly dropped, submerged, sat on, and lost, so a good backup of your Palm data is just as important as a backup of your hard disk. BackupBuddy Software recently released a Macintosh version of BackupBuddy NG, a Palm conduit that preserves the essential data on your handheld more efficiently than the default backup conduit included with the Palm MacPac 2.1 software (see the recent TidBITS series "Palm Desktop 2.1"). Essentially, BackupBuddy records the active state of your Palm device properly, so restoring after a catastrophic data loss does not result in deleted applications being sent back to the Palm, which is a possibility with the default backup software. Retrieving data lost from your Palm device is just a matter of performing a new HotSync synchronization. BackupBuddy NG also preserves data that's been stored in the flash ROM in Palm III and later models (you need TRG's FlashPro or FlashBuilder utilities to access flash ROM as extra storage). You can purchase BackupBuddy NG 1.01 online for $20 from BackupBuddy Software (a 48K download). A trial version is also available. [JLC]

<http://www.backupbuddy.com/bbinfo.html>
<http://db.tidbits.com/series/1131>
<http://www.trgnet.com/cat-flashpro.htm>