Had an interesting crash and restore problem last night and this morning; thought I'd explain it here for mutual benefit and maybe to get a question answered (I'm flummoxed as to the cause of a data corruption).
Turned on the T3 last night - dead. Totally dead, no power. Put on cradle to juice it up, carefuly lifted slider, soft reset with the stulus. Up comes the familiar "click click beep and digitizer. It had performed its own hard reset. JackFlash of course brought back all the apps, and I restored from CardBackup. It did not restore all the files, so I went into "Partial restore," restored all that were checked, and things seemed fine. That's the first question - why didn't they all restore when I hit "Full Restore?" Oh well, at least it's up and running. Curiously, the apps NOT restored were everything to do with hacks - TealMaster, YAHM and the hacks they run.
HotSynched this morning and got the endless "spinny spinny" on "Contacts." Those of you who know me will not be shocked at the fact that sometimes (especially at 6AM with half a cup of coffe in me), I'm not the most patient guy in the world. So I hit "cancel" on the Palm, "Cancel" on the desktop, took the T3 off the cradle and used task manager to cancel the hotsync.exe. No more spinny spinny, thank you very much. Let's start again . . . .
Restarted Hotsync and set the Desktop conduit for Contacts to "Desktop overwrites." That worked, all went fine. Then I restored Contacts DBase from the card again, and same problem. Hmm . . . must be a corrupt address/contacts database. My question here: why would that happen? Was it corrupted by something I did and therefore a "bad" copy made to CardBackup, or was CardBackup's restored copy bad?
Once again I set to "Desktop overwrites," restored fine, and I've probably lost 4-5 new addresses entered since I last hotsynched (I do that only weekly or so). I've subsequently entered a "test name and address," with Desktop now set to "synchronize," and all went fine.
Can anyone explain what happened? The T3 died sometime yesterday evening, but the last backup was at 5PM. I'm thinking either it didn't have enough juice to properly back that up (which is the copy I used for restore), or CardBackup itself glitched and the unit stayed on instead of turning off. I doubt this scenario, since CardBackup has never failed before, and the "auto off" after 3 minutes (I have it set for 5 minutes with "AlwaysOn") would have kicked in, right?
What is the validity of the "check for corrupt files" on Palm Desktop specifically for contacts? Should I run that semi-often in future to make sure there's no corruption(s)? And is there another way of FORCING the desktop to take whatever information is on a card-restored contacts backup?
I'd like to think that CardBackup is all I need and that I don't have to HotSynch daily/every 2 days, but it is rather annoying that although all the addresses "came back" after restore, the T3 didn't "talk nicely" with the desktop conduit. I the "check for corruptions in Contacts" on Desktop/Contacts and it came up with no problems.
PS:
I'm amending this post to say that I have no doubt that Mooseman, egarc, dwinget, drbaer or others might be able to diagnose this if I were a "normal" user. Unfortunately, I have so much "whacky stuff" (the accurate term for "power user!") that it becomes difficult. Aside from the Sprat/Flash thing, for example, I HATE the fact that predicted text happens on AddressTitlesDB and AddressCompaniesDB. Therefore, I use TealMover to delete those every now and again - when you go back into Contacts, they're restored at "0." That's fine, and avoids (over time) a flashing of multiple yellow hilited blocks of text when you start to enter a "Title" or "Company" info. What I may have done is delete the databases, forgotten to reopen Contacts, and then it backed up without that information on CardBackup. During restore, they were not restored, and therefore that hosed the Desktop Hotsynch. That's all I can think of - any input would be appreciated. TIA/ p
Turned on the T3 last night - dead. Totally dead, no power. Put on cradle to juice it up, carefuly lifted slider, soft reset with the stulus. Up comes the familiar "click click beep and digitizer. It had performed its own hard reset. JackFlash of course brought back all the apps, and I restored from CardBackup. It did not restore all the files, so I went into "Partial restore," restored all that were checked, and things seemed fine. That's the first question - why didn't they all restore when I hit "Full Restore?" Oh well, at least it's up and running. Curiously, the apps NOT restored were everything to do with hacks - TealMaster, YAHM and the hacks they run.
HotSynched this morning and got the endless "spinny spinny" on "Contacts." Those of you who know me will not be shocked at the fact that sometimes (especially at 6AM with half a cup of coffe in me), I'm not the most patient guy in the world. So I hit "cancel" on the Palm, "Cancel" on the desktop, took the T3 off the cradle and used task manager to cancel the hotsync.exe. No more spinny spinny, thank you very much. Let's start again . . . .
Restarted Hotsync and set the Desktop conduit for Contacts to "Desktop overwrites." That worked, all went fine. Then I restored Contacts DBase from the card again, and same problem. Hmm . . . must be a corrupt address/contacts database. My question here: why would that happen? Was it corrupted by something I did and therefore a "bad" copy made to CardBackup, or was CardBackup's restored copy bad?
Once again I set to "Desktop overwrites," restored fine, and I've probably lost 4-5 new addresses entered since I last hotsynched (I do that only weekly or so). I've subsequently entered a "test name and address," with Desktop now set to "synchronize," and all went fine.
Can anyone explain what happened? The T3 died sometime yesterday evening, but the last backup was at 5PM. I'm thinking either it didn't have enough juice to properly back that up (which is the copy I used for restore), or CardBackup itself glitched and the unit stayed on instead of turning off. I doubt this scenario, since CardBackup has never failed before, and the "auto off" after 3 minutes (I have it set for 5 minutes with "AlwaysOn") would have kicked in, right?
What is the validity of the "check for corrupt files" on Palm Desktop specifically for contacts? Should I run that semi-often in future to make sure there's no corruption(s)? And is there another way of FORCING the desktop to take whatever information is on a card-restored contacts backup?
I'd like to think that CardBackup is all I need and that I don't have to HotSynch daily/every 2 days, but it is rather annoying that although all the addresses "came back" after restore, the T3 didn't "talk nicely" with the desktop conduit. I the "check for corruptions in Contacts" on Desktop/Contacts and it came up with no problems.
PS:
I'm amending this post to say that I have no doubt that Mooseman, egarc, dwinget, drbaer or others might be able to diagnose this if I were a "normal" user. Unfortunately, I have so much "whacky stuff" (the accurate term for "power user!") that it becomes difficult. Aside from the Sprat/Flash thing, for example, I HATE the fact that predicted text happens on AddressTitlesDB and AddressCompaniesDB. Therefore, I use TealMover to delete those every now and again - when you go back into Contacts, they're restored at "0." That's fine, and avoids (over time) a flashing of multiple yellow hilited blocks of text when you start to enter a "Title" or "Company" info. What I may have done is delete the databases, forgotten to reopen Contacts, and then it backed up without that information on CardBackup. During restore, they were not restored, and therefore that hosed the Desktop Hotsynch. That's all I can think of - any input would be appreciated. TIA/ p