Backing up your Village Sim game requires a degree of active management on your part to be truly effective, since I don't consider the occasional HotSync a good backup strategy.

Village Sim creates a separate savegame file (VillageSavegame.pdb) on your Palm and updates it every time the game is exited (v1.1 displays a message informing the user of this fact when you exit the game). Each time you perform a HotSync, that file is copied to your PC, and is placed in the 'backup' folder for Palm desktop (usually \program files\palm (or palmone)\user_name\backup). Depending upon when you last performed a HotSync, that file may or may not be useful to you (you can note the date/time of the file when you are looking at the contents of the backup folder). Double-clicking on the file VillageSavegame.pdb will put it in QuickInstall, ready to be HotSynced back onto your Palm. Since the game probably wasn't paused when you last HotSynced, you'll have to change your Palm's system clock to match the date/time of the savegame file before you launch Village Sim to keep your game from experiencing a period of neglect (but you can bring up the game, pause it, exit, and set the Palm's clock back to the correct time).

Even if recovering an earlier savegame file isn't a good option for you, here is a method of "backing up" multiple iterations of your savegame file that requires no additional investment in backup software:

The first thing you want to do is set your game speed to "paused" so that, no matter how long it is between when you save it and when you restore it, you won't have any disasters resulting from the passage of time. Then exit your game and perform a HotSync. That will put the most recent savegame on your PC. The savegame file (VillageSavegame.pdb) will be stored in the 'backup' folder described above. To be extra safe, you can copy the savegame file to another folder somewhere else on your PC, so that subsequent HotSync operations won't overwrite it. You can either rename the savegame file(s) to something meaningful (until you need to restore it, at which point you'll need to restore the original filename), or you can store each savegame file in its own subfolder. I use that method myself to keep many savegames from various stages of the game to use for testing purposes.

If disaster ever strikes and you need to restore your backup, go to the folder where your savegame file is stored and double-click it. That will put it into QuickInstall, ready to be HotSynced back onto your Palm. Perform another HotSync and VOILA! You're ready to start right up from where you left off. The only oddity that you will notice is that your "Realtime hours played" statistic will reflect the total time that the game has been "running" - including the time it was paused. That's just how that particular statistic works.

(thanks to Barbara, again!)