I tried finding this on Palm’s website, but couldn’t.
I currently have a Palm IIIxe. Well, it’s getting on in years (months?) and the time has come to move upward to newer and better things. So, I’m looking at the m515. Suits me well, nice display, decent price (I get it at a discount because I work for a place that sells it).
Now then, I have a lot of data on my IIIxe that I don’t want to lose. Now I’ve never done an upgrade from one Palm to another (the IIIxe being my first Palm). My question is, how do I get the data from my Palm Desktop to the m515? Do I give the m515 the same username and then do a sync and hope that Palm Desktop doesn’t care that it’s not a IIIxe? Will my m515 come with some sort of “conversion” software to convert the data from my IIIxe Desktop to the m515?
I upgraded a few years ago from a Palm III to a Palm Vx. There were no problems at all, the Palm Vx hotsynced to my Desktop and loaded all the data that had formerly been hotsynched to the Palm III.
Also, you can export all the Palm data and then import it. I had exported all of my data (just in case), but as it turned out everything worked beautifully.
To sum up: Palm good. Problem none.
(assuming that m515 doesn’t use some completely different data system than previous Palms.)
When I last did it, I think I installed the new version of the desktop software over the old one. Then sync the new Palm. It was explained in the printed manual.
I can’t remember the details, but older versions of the Palm Desktop didn’t copy all the data. You might want to sync your current Palm to the new version of the Desktop first. There’s a shareware called BackupBuddy which does a complete backup, but I think the newer versions of Palm Desktop has similar capabilities.
Also, always keep a backup of the backup!. Just copy the entire data folder (C:\Program Files\Palm<username> or something like that) to another folder or drive. If something goes wrong, copy it back to the original location and try again. Otherwise, one stupid mistake can wipe out both the PDA and the desktop, e.g. by allowing the contents of the new Palm (i.e. nothing) to replace the Desktop data.
p.s. Can I use “sync” as verb and if so, what’s the past tense??