Is SPB Backup worth $24.95? + general BU questions.

[TheBundo]

Originally Posted by jmorton10

This may help you decide what to do.

SPB has a feature that nobody has mentioned. You set up a directory on your PC/LT to store a second copy of every full BU file. Then, every time you sync the phone to the computer, it automatically copies any new BU's it finds to the PC.

That way, you always have at least two copies of every BU file & it does it automatically as long as you sync the phone occasionally. I always have about 6 current BU's on my card & also in my LT at all times.

I never worry that a BU will be corrupt etc because if one becomes corrupt I always have one from the day before to rely on (& there is no way I will ever lose them all at once when they are in two different physical locations)

~John

Wouldn't that just be a feature of ActivSync or SyncCenter? I don't see that option in SPB Backup anywhere. How did you set that up?

[AngeloUCF]

Do either of these different backup applications also restore email account setup? I typically use WMDC to backup periodically and before a flash, but I'm also synced with exchange so restoring contacts and my outlook calendar is extremely simple, I just hate having to re-enter all of my different email accounts (5) after a hard reset.

[iknight8]

im not sure if someone said it but u can use My Phone to back up almost everything frm ur phone i used it and it works 110% great!!!

[eatbuckshot]

Iknight8, I believe My Phone sync service from Microsoft will only go about synchronizing the "Usual" data: contacts, tasks, appointments, emails, etc.. He's looking for more of a complete backup solution in terms of quick restoration of the entire phone including any customizations, settings, software and other important files. My phone has a limit of syncing once per day if I remember correctly. It could be yet another fall-back for the basic data though.

Btw, Thank you for posting your inquiries on finding an effective backup solution. I've actually been searching for a backup software for quite a while, even though I did find out about sbp backup and learned that it is praised by many, I still didn't quite understand the features and the efficacies of spb backup. I remained relatively stagnant on the issue and I never found out more. Your thorough questioning and the answers provided finally enlightened me to the program's use and my criteria is word for word what you're looking for, I just never gathered enough time to articulate in a post. It was also a bit lucky for me to search now and find this thread. I usually only read into threads that are relatively new in order to find non outdated information.
Anyways, I think this is really good info on full on backup solutions, perhaps this should be added to the useful things sticky

[WBFAir]

Hello all

Well as the OP I thought I would give a final report on what I ended up doing and as to why as I think some has subscribed to this thread to see how things turned out (and maybe I’ll get some more thank points as I’ve been stuck on 40 now for about a week, hint hint )


Anyway, believe it or not I decided to go with SPB.

First off I should state and maybe this is sort of an apology but being so new to this type of a device I was thinking it would be like my laptop where it was quite normal to perform a complete backup of everything on that to a remote storage location such as the dedicated hard drive I have for BU storage on my PC, which I do this via a shared folder network connection from running the BU software on the LT.

I understand now that this is normally not the case with these devices and that everyone, including at least all the BU programs I found, considers the SD card as a perfectly good storage location which is fine but even with that for me, given how many times I have herd SD cards fail, plus what is stored on that, I still was looking for more and I’ll provide more on that later.

At any rate again if came off as hard nosed on that, I get it now.

So in the end I ended up evaluating three different programs, Resco, SPB and Sprite.

For the Resco program I really liked it and the Resco company, they seem to make some really nice stuff and I had read of some even leaving SPB for Resco.

So I tried it but unfortunately at least in my eyes, I found that it just doesn’t seem to be to well tweaked for WM6 but in all fairness it isn’t listed as being for WM6 anyway but more listed as WM5+

To report on this, the program installed and seemed to perform the BU just fine but what I found was that the services it seemed to shut down made it difficult for the any required post BU operations and reset as I typically found that I had to do quite a bit of funky stuff to reset the device which one time included even having to remove the bat cover and push the reset button.

Now in Resocs defense, they do have a very accessible text file that lists all the programs and services it shuts down that you can add or take away those from but to be honest I really don’t know enough about all that nor have the time to play with it but if someone did, it might be possible to set this file up so that everything works nice.

Now the other thing that really attracted me to the program was the incremental backups but in kinda relating to the only doing what’s on the device BU to the SD card thing, now that I see that I’m only going to be using the program to BU the device, this really became kind of a mute point as I found that even with all that I have on the device, it only took about 3 minutes to backup everything to the card.

Also in testing the incremental BU it indeed did that and the incremental BU only took 91 seconds but what I also found, and at least for me couldn’t see any other way of doing this, was that what is essentially did was make a second smaller BU file and did not over write or amend to the existing one, which I guess the idea for a restore would be to install the last full BU, then what ever last incremental you might want.

Just to mention perhaps I’m wrong on some of that as one, I’m hardly an expert on this stuff, plus I didn’t read through all the instructions either, but that at least to me, that seemed to be the logical conclusion.

The last thing I was a bit put off on was the way it made the backup was to create a file that contained a lot of little zip files which I thought, well it might not be to hard to have one of those go bad and the what would happened during a restore to the rest of it?

On the other side though if you did want to get a file it is kinda there although since that are all just sequentially numbers it might be hard to find so I guess it all boils down to preference.

Also just to touch on it, I personally didn’t particularly like the way the unpacker listed all the files either, not that it was bad persay but in compared to the SPB unpacker, I just felt it wasn’t as clear.

I should mention that I did do some posting to their support form and did have some dialog directly from them on things so I would give them a plus for that. As well they have some nice quick start and full instruction .pdf files available for download that you can read before you even get the program so I liked that too.

I guess in the end I felt if I really wanted the Resco product I may have gotten it to work but that it may just have been to much deal with for me so I decided to pass but as it was the cheapest of all three it might be right for others.

Next I tried the SPB product but I think I will actually report on the Sprite program first but just to note, I didn’t really spend as much time evaluating this one as the Resco so I don’t have as much to report on it but at any rate here is what I have.

So I went to Sprites site for the BU program and downloaded the PocketPC version and installed it and it was working horribly, then I tried to uninstall it and I couldn’t even get it all off.

It was then and after doing some Google-ing, that I found out that the regular PocketPC version that I got from the link on the BU programs main page is not the one for the HTC TP2!

I then went back to their site and did some more looking around and found a "get the right program for your device thing" and got the right version.

Now truthfully, I guess I would consider this my fault and as I don’t know much about this stuff I’m sure I miss understood something along the way, but it sure would have been nice to have something setup better to let a novice like me know about this as I think most will think that what ever is offered as the standard PocketPC version will be OK for the TP2.

So after finally getting off all the PocketPC stuff which btw even after a full reg search and delete of everything Sprite, still required a database venture with MemMaid to get it out of my uninstall list, I finally installed the program and it worked very well although I will say is did take a but longer then SPB and seemed to act a little less like it was well tweaked for things as there was just little things that it didn’t seem to do so smooth.

At any rate and especially in consideration that it’s a few buck more then SPB, I decided to pass on this one but again, it may be good for others.

So lastly to get to SPB’s program.

Well as this report has been long enough and there has already is a lot of positive stuff posted about SBP in this tread I don’t think I will go into it too much other then to say that it seems to work very well and smooth with WM6.1, especially in the post BU operations of resetting things, it is just as fast the full backup as any of the other three and I really liked its unpacking program most of all as it really has a nice layout of all that has been backed up.

About the only thing bad about it I could say was that I really didn’t like that there wasn’t a option to have the saved backup file saved as anything else other then a .exe file.

I gather this it to make it easer if you have to do a restore from the SD card and you have to program on the SD card but it also means that if you accidentally activate it if you are trying work with it for say a copy and paste kind of thing, which well all know how easy that is, then you will be really waiting for a long time as it tries to startup a program it can’t find.

Now I was able to copy the file to my PC, then rename the ext, then return it the SD card but all in all it would have been nicer if they would just allow you to decide how you wanted it before you did the BU.

At any rate again to sum things up simply with all things considered I liked the SPB better then the rest so that is what I went with.

Now one last thing to note on all of these, as I just don’t have the time to try this, I "did not” try "any" of them with a hard reset and complete or even partial restore thing so I can’t comment at all on how that process would go nor if the programs saves all or any of the needed info or not.

And just to mention, SPB does state to not let the ActiveSync perform a “Sync” before you do a backup which to me seems pretty tough as that thing by default is designed to do just that and I don’t think is very easy to stop but I guess it could be done. But it would be nice if that wasn’t such a priority of SPB, especially as it doesn’t seem to be for the others.

At any rate I just wanted to make a note that I did not test any of these for restore.


So I guess the last thing to report on is what I ended up doing for the finally backup to my PC which simply put, once I saw that I can setup the SD disk as a removable disk during the sync and that both my present image backup and file copy programs recognized and could work with that disk, it kinda became a no brainier.

Now there are may programs for this but the two I have are Acronis BU for the image and SyncBack Pro for the file copy so I can at least report that these two programs saw and took everything off my card and did so with out issue. Btu again I should also mention that I attempted no restores of anything either.

Now I should mention that I think you can just as easily just do a copy and paste of the whole card as well but now we are getting back to the whole incremental thing in that especially as I have a 16 gig card with about 8 of it filled now, if lets say I took about 50 pix and want to do a backup of those, well I don’t want to have to do 8 gigs of copy and paste, and yeah perhaps that’s not the best example as you could just copy just those but my point is, if you understand incremental backups and why you have them, it gets those, their directory structure and anything else that may have changed elsewhere on the disk that you may have forgotten about.

Plus with all the options a program gives you plus the smoothness and simplicity it provides, an along with the fact that I have had issues with copy and pasting, for instance how many have walked away from a large copy and paste and thought work was getting done only to return after a half hour and find it stopped at 20 files because it hit a read only file and was asking if you indeed wanted to copy it, in the end it just makes things easer and faster.

I mean I could go one for quite a bit of time on this as to why a program and incrementals are needed and is such a big time saver and this has been long enough but my point is, at least for me, it makes much more sense to use these over just C&P as they both have more and better capabilities.

So I guess to wrap things up, I decided on SPB to backup my device to the SD card, then will be sync-ing the device as a removable disk and using those two programs to backup the card to the PC.

Would it have been nice to have one program on the device that could just do all this directly to the PC, yeah sure but I see now that no such animal exists so I guess for now this is the best I can do.

One last note regarding this since I have gotten to this point, I know some of the programs do allow backing up of both the device and card to a FTP location, which I suppose I could then get it from that and it to my PC, but to be honest, I felt that one, that relies on to many other factors not having issues and just adds to the complexities of setting things up, and two as still especially as there is no incremental part, in the end seems more time and step consuming.

Well I hope any of this is of some help to others.

Thanks for all the help from everyone.

[bkrodgers]

Holy crap that was a long post.

[binumathew]

I have a question as well with back ups. I just got my phone and it is flashed with the silence rom (fantastic by the way). I have everything set up the way i like it with tweeks and settings. I did not install applications yet (waiting for a card) but I plan on soon. From what i've read so far spb back up will back up everything including the rom. This is a problem for me. I am not concerned so much about backing up to the original state of my phone as if i crippled my phone; I want to keep up with new updates to the silence rom so will be flashing when available. I use microsoft myphone which works great for contacts etc. but what about my tweeks and settings and future applications.

Sashimi seems to do what I want from what I have read. But not sure how it works. It seems to be a complicated mess to me at least. Im not even sure if it works on 6.5 custom roms. I watched his/her youtube videos but just as complicated. This could all possibly be my fault as I am more well versed in apple osx then I am with windows and this seems to be very windows-esque program.

To end the long rant can some one explain to me how to run sashimi or hopefully a better suited program for my purposes. Again sorry for not being as pc savy as most others here.

[Boo Boo]

thats how much they want for it? crap glad I got it and saved 24.95

[x10guy]

Originally Posted by bkrodgers

Holy crap that was a long post.

+1... that looooong post was probably worth $24.95 by itself.. lol!

[Izziz]

conflicts conflicts conflicts. Upgrade your Tp2 to win 6.5