14 DAY TRIAL // Users of a Palm handset who were in the position of synchronizing their backed up data to another webOS device or to one that has been reseted have recently discovered that a lot of personal information stored on their online Palm Profile went missing. The password-protected Web page enabled them to back up contacts, calendar entries, tasks and memos and then retrieve them when necessary, yet it seems that some of the files could not be retrieved, and the issue might be permanent.
The problem has stirred a lot of discussions over forums and also made it to the headlines, especially since it follows shortly after a major outage over at Microsoft / Danger, which affected a series of T-Mobile Sidekick users. However, Sunnyvale-based mobile-phone maker Palm stepped up and acknowledged the problem, and also added that it was already working along with wireless carrier Sprint to resolve the issue that apparently affected both users of a Palm Pre and those of a Palm Pixi device.
“We are seeing a small number of customers who have experienced issues transferring their Palm Profile information to another Palm webOS device,” the handset vendor stated, according to a recent post on sfgate. “Palm and Sprint are working closely together to support these customers to successfully transfer their information to the new device.” Palm users can back up their data on computers too, as the phone maker delivered solutions to sync contacts and calendar entries to Google, Microsoft Outlook, or Yahoo, yet there are a lot of other files that are not covered here.
It should be interesting to see how the problem will eventually find a resolution. The T-Mobile Sidekick outage was resolved after a few weeks, and some users managed to retrieve their personal files only recently, while some said that the process didn't work for them. Since the incidents involving the cloud data backup service failures seem to occur more often, users might start thinking twice before choosing this path, one should agree.