Does Backup backup the storage card?

[spursdude]

I'm trying to get in the habit of backing up my PPC, as per the front page post. If I do a full backup, will it also backup everything on my storage card (like all my wma files?)

And also, if I set it to automatically do an incremental backup every sync, will all my data be preserved, or only the parts that have been recently changed? Thanks.

[Sven Johannsen]

No, it does not backup the storage card, but that is not subject to data loss due to power loss, i.e draining the battery dry. To back up the memory card, I would highly recommend a USB reader for whatever format you need, and doing manual backups that way. You can certainly just drag the contents of your memory card over to a folder on your PC using AS, but that is fairly slow.

Incremental means, back up the changes since last full backup. It is used on large systems to save backup media. I can do a full backup on one tape, and daily incrementals for a week on one tape. To restore, I would need to restore the full and each incremental. I am not sure how the PPC handles incrementals and the restore from them. It may automate the whole process. Certainly it would take less time to backup incrementally, but it could take significantly longer to restore if there are many incremental pieces to put back.

[Pony99CA]

I'm trying to get in the habit of backing up my PPC, as per the front page post. If I do a full backup, will it also backup everything on my storage card (like all my wma files?)

As Sven said, your storage card is not backed up. However, does it really need to be? Unless you installed programs on it which created their own data files there, all of the files on your storage card are probably already on your host PC.

If you have to back up your storage card, Sven suggested a good way. I've done that in the past to copy data from my old 128 MB SD card to my new 256 MB SD card.


And also, if I set it to automatically do an incremental backup every sync, will all my data be preserved, or only the parts that have been recently changed?
I wish I knew that, too. I did a full backup the first time, and do incremental backups now. I assume that ActiveSync is either appending changed files to the original backup file or somehow replacing them.

One way to tell would be to do a full backup, check the size of the backup.stg file, then immediately do an incremental backup and check the size again. If the file was the same size or larger, you probably have all of your files there. My backup.stg file is over 50 MB.

On my Windows 98 SE system, backup.stg is in the C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\ActiveSync\Profiles\<Pocket PC Name> directory.

Steve