If you've been a Palm user for more than a little while, odds are that at some point or another you've had to backup and restore your PDA. The standard Hot Sync conduits back up most of your data to the computer, and Blue Nomad's Backup Buddy has been a standard desktop solution for fully backing up Palm OS PDAs for a number of years. Since the introduction of SD slots on Palms, there have been a few card-based backup solutions that take advantage of the fact that cards are portable (and can travel with the PDA when you're away from the computer) and that you can easily schedule backups to the card without a need for any external hardware.

There have been two major flaws, however, with most card-based backup solutions that are available. First, they tend to lose certain preference settings (including registration codes!), so if you do a full restore, they'll get all your software and data back, but you can end up spending a lot of time getting everything back in place how you like it. Second, with the advent of NVFS Palms, memory issues related to how NVFS works can sometimes cause crashes during backup operations.

After frustrations with both of these problems using previous card backup software, I was intrigued to hear about a new open source backup program released by Alex Pruss, called NVBackup. For free, how could I go wrong trying it?

NVBackup is pretty simple to set up, you can either do manual backups, or have it perform daily backups on a set schedule. It can only keep a current backup, or you can set it to keep a rotating "cycle" of up to 7 backups, allowing you a chance to revert to a previous day if you've drastically screwed something up on your Palm. You can even mark a manual backup to not be included in the cycle, so you always have a known starting point to go back to (I, for example, recently used this when I upgraded my 650's firmware and wanted to clean it out instead of just doing a restore, but wanted the security blanket of the full restore if I ended up needing it). Backups can be encrypted with a key if you prefer, and you can choose from multiple levels of compression, especially handy if you like to keep multiple backups. You can do both selective and full restores, and you can update a previous backup set if you ever need to.

What's unique about NVBackup is that it uses a different method to read and store the data than most other programs, and manages to work around the cache issues that tend to screw up other backup programs. Whether as a side effect of this, or just because it is more diligent in what it backs up, it is also the only card backup program I've used that can do a full, picture-perfect restore of my Treo. All reg codes, preferences, etc. are exactly as I left them. Try that with one of the other backup options! In fact, NVBackup is so good that I've been using Backup Buddy to back up the SD card with my backups, and nothing else...it's much easier to restore the SD card and then restore the Treo from that than it is to deal with resetting all the preferences and reg codes that a Backup Buddy desktop restore would lose.

But there's more icing on the cake, too. If you have an internet connected Palm that doesn't sync time to your cell network, NVBackup can be set to sync with an internet time server after it backs up your system. If you want your Palm to soft reset after a backup, just to play it safe, NVBackup can do that, too.

If you've got an internet connection on your Palm, NVBackup can even automatically upload your backup to your FTP server to give you offsite backups (of course, it can import a backup set from a server, too).

And did I mention it's free? Seriously, Palm software doesn't get better than this. It's free, and it works way better than the paid alternatives. I actually paid money for one, and happily retired it when I tried NVBackup. Thanks to Alex Pruss, your backups can be painfree, too!