Sprite Pocket Backup and time changes

[Jacob]

Weird thing.

I went to Europe for a week and so I changed the time on my PPC to show the time that it was there.. make sense right?

Well, I have the backup software set to backup at 4AM every night.

This happened in Europe at 4AM Europe time too.

When I returned I changed the time back to Chicago time. However, come 9PM Chicago time (4AM Europe time) the backup kicked off again.

I would have thought that Pocketbackup would wait until it was 4AM .. no matter what the time zone.

[Bob Anderson]

I had the same problem ... I went to Houston, TX (from Seattle, WA) and using the program City Time, I selected my "visiting" city.

For the entire time I was there, the iPaq would backup at 5 AM, as I had scheduled it to do. When I came back to Seattle and changed (via City Time) my home location, the first day back it backed up at 3AM (which was 5AM in Houston.)

The next day, everything was OK. Now it gladly does the backup operation at 5AM Seattle time.

At the time I thought that was weird. I have to wonder what the reason for this is.

[Jacob]

Okay.

I am glad to hear that it goes back to normal the next day. I wonder if this is a known problem or not.

I just posted it on their forums and hopefully they can confirm it and fix it. If it goes back to normal the next day then it's not so big an issue though.

[Jacob]

Thought I'd update this with a little note.

A rep from Sprite software replied to my post (http://www.spritesoftware.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=907) on their forums and said there were a bunch of known issues with time zone changes and they would be fixed within the next few weeks.

[cyclist]

I had the same problem ... I went to Houston, TX (from Seattle, WA) and using the program City Time, I selected my "visiting" city.

For the entire time I was there, the iPaq would backup at 5 AM, as I had scheduled it to do. When I came back to Seattle and changed (via City Time) my home location, the first day back it backed up at 3AM (which was 5AM in Houston.)

The next day, everything was OK. Now it gladly does the backup operation at 5AM Seattle time.

At the time I thought that was weird. I have to wonder what the reason for this is.

Ah-ha. Your symptoms give me an idea about what might be going on, this is only a guess, I don't actually know for sure.

Sprite backups sit in the Notify Queue, which is part of the operating system. You can use that excellent little free program Remover to see the contents of your Notify Queue. My next scheduled backup in the list looks like this:
\Windows\Sprite\WakeUpService.exe 2004/03/15 06:50
I interpret that to mean that at 06:50 on Monday morning the notify queue will wake up my PPC and run the Sprite WakeUpService program.

Whenever I've examined my Notify Queue, it only ever contains the next scheduled backup. So I'd guess that Sprite only writes the next backup event to the queue after the last backup has been triggered.

When Bob was away from home, Sprite wrote an event to the Notify Queue at 5 am Houston time. Bob then changed the time on his PPC back by two hours, and the operating system adjusted the time of every event in the Notify Queue by 2 hours. So the backup already in the queue for 5 am was adjusted to 3 am. Then when this backup happened, Sprite wrote its next event to the notify queue for the scheduled time of 5 am, thus correcting the error.

My own experience of using my XDA in Germany which is one hour ahead of my home in the UK would also be explained by this theory. I entered the birthday of one of my German friends in Calendar as an all day event while I was in Germany. The reminders for all day events normally happen at 8am, but the one for this friend went off at 7 am instead.

If my theory is correct, then there isn't a direct fix. A workaround would be to disable regular backups to remove the next backup from the notify queue (not sure this will always work), then change the time on the PPC, then re-enable regular backup so that the next backup is put into the notify queue at the right time.

I have no idea why this only seems to happen when moving the time backward but not when moving forward.

[cyclist]

An update on this issue. Early Sunday morning UK (and most of Europe) moved to summer time. When I turned my PPC on it dutifully informed me that it had updated for summer time and asked me to confirm the time change. Out of curiosity I went and looked at my notify queue. The scheduled time for my Sprite backup on Monday morning had changed from 6:50am to 9:50am. I have no idea what induced it to move by 3 hours for a 1 hour time change.

[gvanjr]

Thought I'd update this with a little note.

A rep from Sprite software replied to my post (http://www.spritesoftware.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=907) on their forums and said there were a bunch of known issues with time zone changes and they would be fixed within the next few weeks.Damn, you ACTUALLY got a response? I emailed their support folks a couple of weeks ago, have yet to receive a response. Personally, I find it pathetic that they do not respond to email questions and don't even have an actual user manual...but they DO have my money! Never again.

[Jacob]

I've never had too much of a problem with their support.

I haven't had many questions though :?

There aren't many companies I know of that I haven't heard some reports of bad service at least.

[Steven Cedrone]

Damn, you ACTUALLY got a response? I emailed their support folks a couple of weeks ago, have yet to receive a response. Personally, I find it pathetic that they do not respond to email questions and don't even have an actual user manual...but they DO have my money! Never again.

I would tend to think that your email must have been trapped by a SPAM filter. Every time I have conteacted them, I have received a reply (maybe not as fast as I would have wanted, but they did reply)

Steve