Palm Pre Suffers Backup Issues [Palm's Online Profile Feature Doesn't Backup Correctly]

If you’re an touch-screen connoisseur and have resisted the peer pressure to go with an iPhone or Android, and instead went with the Palm Pre, you should be aware that when restoring your personal information from the online Palm Profile, your data might be missing, incomplete and unfortunately, irretrievable.

One of the features of Palm’s webOS was the Palm Profile, where you could backup your contacts, calendar, tasks and memos to the internet and sync that data back to your phone if you ever needed too. Too bad it doesn’t work right.

Both Palm and Sprint have acknowledged that the service is not working correctly. Users who have tried to restore their data from Palm Profile have found that the data is missing, and apparently, gone forever.

Past Palm smartphones that ran PalmOS had a robust backup system where users could sync their data to a personal computer. However with their new touch-screen webOS, Palm users instead backup their data to Palm servers and the Palm Profile service. Even if they wanted to sync their data to a desktop, webOS users are unable to.

Last month, we reported on Microsoft losing the data of T-Mobile Sidekick users. Draw your own conclusions on the safety of backing up your mobile phone personal data to the Cloud instead of on your own personal computer.