Data Lost. . .and Found

This is a true fable in the life of The Ancient One. It is a fable of the age of technology in which we live and how precarious data are.

The story begins a few weeks ago when Donna could not find her Palm Tungsten E2. She looked for it for several days to no avail; it was gone. As it happened, she was not happy with her current cell phone and was eligible for one of those special deal upgrades that the various providers of mobile service offer their loyal customers. So off she went and got a great deal on a Palm Centro. Now she had a combination phone/PDA and could HotSync all her data from her Palm Desktop (which she did).

As often happens, a few days after getting her new phone/PDA, Donna found the lost PDA. It also happens that my Palm Tungsten T/X had gone berserk; while I could HotSync it with the desktop, I couldn't bring up the screens. I would touch the appropriate spot on its little screen and it would act as if I touched another part of the screen. The Ancient One thought that it would be nice to get a Centro too but he is not eligible for a special deal until next January. But Donna said he could have her E2 if that would help. Of course it would. But, whenever he tried to HotSync it with his desktop, it refused to do so. Once an identity has been established on a Palm PDA, you can't just change it even though you can have several identities on the desktop.

Then The Ancient One had a brilliant idea. He would do what is called a "hard reset" on the E2, wiping it clean so he could then set it up in his identity with his data. Fair enough. But he also did a couple of other things that turned out to be less than smart. First, he thought he would try to resurrect his T/X by doing a hard reset on it, which he did. However, while that wiped the PDA clean, it did not solve the problem of the device thinking that it was being poked at distance locations on the screen from where it was being tapped. So he declared the T/X dead and got ready to HotSync his desktop to the E2.

Now here is where it gets really stupid! Before starting the HotSync, The Ancient One looked at the Palm website and found that there was an updated version of the desktop available for downloading. We all know that with technology newer is better. Right? Well, not necessarily. He downloaded the new software and installed it. It easily replaced the earlier version. Then he moved on to carry out the HotSync only to discover that there were no data to move from the desktop to the handheld. ALL THE DATA WERE GONE!

So, for the past week-and-a-half, The Ancient One has been searching for his data. He knew that the address book, datebook, and memo and notepads were somewhere on his computer. But, oh my, they were hidden well and he had nightmares about how long it was going to take to rebuild those data files. Finally, this afternoon he got lucky and found the files. It took a couple of hours but he did figure out how to transfer all those hidden backup files on to the new Palm Desktop and eventually was able to HotSync them with the handheld.

And just in time too! The next doctors' appointments are coming up in the next couple of weeks and The Ancient One really didn't want to call the various offices and try to explain why he had no idea when the appointments were.

As with all good fables, this one had a happy ending and The Ancient One is smiling again. : - D