So, I went away for the weekend and somehow my PalmOne Zire 71 powered itself on and refused to turn off. Fine. Great. I use BackupBuddy, so restoring it is pretty much a breeze.

EXCEPT for LDW software. When I have done a restore in the past, LDW software comes back to a demo version with the game started back at the beginning. I have 6 of the 7 magic fish and $40000 in Fish Tycoon and I do NOT want to go back to the start!

I have not yet tried to restore my Palm this time, because I'm hoping that someone here can suggest which files need to be brought back. If not, I guess I start again, but icky!!!

Thanks for any help anyone might be able to give me! I will wait until tomorrow (Monday the 20th) to restore, but after that I need my Zire too much to wait!

Thanks,
Heather (hcwardell at rogers.com for email)

Heather,

How successful you are at completely restoring your games in progress depends on how you have set up BackupBuddy. On the Palm, the games don't use a separate game save file, rather your game progress is stored in "unsaved preferences." Carla posted these instructions, which should help you.

Quote:

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Note, the following instructions relate only to the Palm version. The Pocket PC version has a separate savegame file that can be manual moved around.

1) Go to preferences and "pause" the game
2) Use a utility such as "Backup Buddy"or "Backup Man" (make sure to check the setting for "save unsaved preferences" so that this is enabled) and backup the device completely. BZBackup (Botzum Backup)has also been suggested in these forums.
3) Restore all the above data to your new device (which of course means doing a full restore to the new device).
4) Unpause the game

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Carla, Marketing
Last Day of Work

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Post back here if you need more help.

Thanks. Unfortunately, BackupBuddy says NOT to backup unsaved preferences (since they're "unsaved", apparently it can cause a fatal exception to restore them) and so I have it set NOT to do this.

I will restore my Zire without the games. Yuck. It does seem like rather an odd choice to store the game info in a preferences database.

Thanks very much for the help! Now I can get my little buddy basically back to the way it was! (I've been without it since yesterday morning - horrors!)

Heather

Sorry about your games, Heather. Even though I owned Palm and Clie devices for almost 5 years, I never really understood their inner workings. On more than one occasion I had moderate to serious "loss of stuff" incidents (although BackupBuddy saved the day numerous other times)! I don't know much about application development for Palm OS - well, nothing, actually.

Heather,

The practice of storing the game state in the preferences file has been a very mixed result. It enabled some very handy functions from the programming end, but has proven to be very annoying for the end user. Our subsequent releases will have separate savegame files.

Arthur

What is BackupBuddy?

BackupBuddy is one of a number of 3rd party applications that are used to back up programs and data in Palm OS. It is published by Blue Nomad.

Barbara,

Will BackupBuddy save everything? Like, down to even the registration info in the various programs and games? PalmOne has an update to fix various issues on the TT5, but after reading it, I'm a bit hesitant. It completely wipes out all info back to factory specs, and hopes that you know how to save everything, encluding stuff not normally syncronized during a HotSync, like the stuff on the internal card.

lol, they seem to have no clue that there are those of us out here that have...well, basically... no clue.

Since my T5 is used mainly for testing Village Sim, I did that update on my T5 without using BackupBuddy and followed all of PalmOne's instructions for "backing up everything" on the device. The good news is that everything was fine with the T5 and Village Sim after the procedure. The bad news is that virtually every game that didn't have a separate savegame file (including all of LDW's older Palm games: LPP, FT and PT) lost saved information, including registration info. That was OK for me, but it won't be for most people. You might want to check on the Blue Nomad site to make sure that BackupBuddy now fully supports the T5 and its internal drive. It didn't when I got mine, although the update was in beta at the time, and it's probably fine now.

This is what you need to do to save everything:

(Note to anyone else reading this: the following instructions relate only to Palm devices. Pocket PC versions of LDW games have a separate savegame file.)

• 1) Go to preferences and "pause" the game
  
• 2) Use a utility such as "Backup Buddy"or "Backup Man" (make sure to check the setting for "save unsaved preferences" so that this is enabled) and back up the device completely. BZBackup (Botzum Backup) has also been suggested by some people.
  
• 3) Restore all the above data to your new device (which of course means doing a full restore to the new device).
  
• 4) Unpause the game

This is what Arthur had to say about the way they used to store savegame information:

Quote:

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The practice of storing the game state in the preferences file has been a very mixed result. It enabled some very handy functions from the programming end, but has proven to be very annoying for the end user. Our subsequent releases will have separate savegame files.

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Let me know if you need more help! <img src="http://www.ldwsoftware.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Thanks Barbara,

I'll save this and start checking my files for all my registration info... I have so many 3rd party games and programs, I know that I'll probably loose some... but maybe it's just as well. It's about the only way I'll ever get rid of anything. lol (You should see my closets)