Palm Update and Backup Oddities - Patchers Take Note

Before you panic, we're not saying that the Palm's cloud services are in as much Danger (pun intended) as what Sidekick owners experienced, but we do have a couple oddities to report -- patchers especially should take note.

We're well past time to write about this given the number of tips we've received, so here it is: it looks like a lot of users have had their Pre phones offer them the webOS 1.2.1 update (and the webOS 1.2 update before it) multiple times - despite having the update already applied.

There's a big old thread in our forums discussing the issue and as near as we can tell the bug only seems to be affecting users who have applied patches to their phone.  We haven't been able to pin down the culprit yet, but if a diligent Pre patcher who is experiencing the issue has managed to stop it, please do let us know in the comments.

More disconcertingly, we have plenty of reports of users whose Pre phones haven't been automatically backing up despite having that setting set to 'on.' If you haven't recently, we recommend you take a quick look at your backup app to see if its most recent backup date is yesterday. This issue seems to pop up sporadically and has happened to at least one non-patcher.

We'll also note that a couple of users have had Palm's profile lose some of their data, but right now it looks like a two isolated cases. Our advice: your key data should always be in a minimum of three places:

1. Your Pre (where it's persistent as long as you don't erase anything)
2. A cloud service (Palm, Google, Exchange, etc)
3. Someplace 'else.' For most of us that will be your desktop, where hopefully you're pulling down your data from Google or Exchange. If you're using Palm's profile exclusively, we suggest you take a look at one of the several desktop sync apps that are available now.

So there you go, a small set of strange bugs for a Thursday afternoon. Any of them bugging you?