TealBack Has Yours
| Published 12/10/04

Graphic by: Jenny Conner

The original solution that arrived with the first palm pilot’s was the System Conduit. The conduit’s job was to backup the data on the handheld. It proved to not work reliably enough. Given a little bit of time a developer now known as Blue Nomad released the block-busting, Palm Platinum certified "BackupBuddy" for Palm OS. BackupBuddy essentially replaced or hijacked (take your pick) the system conduit and absolutely backed up your handheld perfectly, every time. BackupBuddy worked so well, it was the second Palm OS program I purchased (For the curious, TealDoc -- then under a different name -- was the first). I have remained astounded and loyal to BackupBuddy ever since. BackupBuddy saved me and my PDA setup (programs included) dozens of times including with a flakey Palm IIIc, which would loose all of its data when squeezed gently.

The ability to backup to a removable card is not a new concept to PDAs. The earliest TRG Pro’s and Handspring Visor’s had modules for backing up your data, and there were even a few attempts to market backup modules based on the palm serial-port. Eventually the army of developers produced a series of software utilities designed to backup RAM data to blank flash modules. Of the first few generations of these utilities, the Blue Nomad release (BackupBuddy VFS) became my early favorite due to its ease of use and the built-in ability to schedule a daily backup.

The faithful Whim readers will realize that I tend to adore TealPoint software products. Teal products are often easy to use, powerful if you delve into the details and as reliable as the Palm OS itself. hen it was brought to my attention that Teal had made a late-entry into the "backup to flash" software field, I was excited, but also nervous. My fears were unfounded.

In a 6 week trial of TealBack vs. BackupBuddy VFS, TealBack wins hands down. Not only does TealBack offer automated backups, and backup encryption like BackupBuddy does, Teal kicks in the features of enhanced encryption (128bit), incremental backups and schedulable "regular/complete" backups. What this means is twice a week I set my handheld to create a whole new backup archive replacing the previous archive on my SD card. The other 5 days a week TealBack only backs-up the files which have changed since the previous backup, making backups go much faster. While the high level encryption backups are quite slow compared to BackupBuddy VFS, they are easily scheduled to happen during the night when my PDA is not in use. Once again using differential backups, the time to complete a backup on "incremental days" is much shorter as far fewer files are being backed-up.

Teal has once again stolen the show. While their entry is late, it comes loaded with all the features one would expect a good backup solution to have. Hat’s off to Teal for their excellent job!

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Kevin Martin is Whim’s Resident Geek. His favorite color is blue, but Teal is always high on his list.

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