This makes the Pre super safe from fail. Because it constantly syncs and in syncing actualy stores it all local, you can be sure if any one link ion the system fails the other has the data.

This was not the case with the sidekick which is why it was such a problem, It did not store information on the device.

You want data back up and protection against failure of a server or cloud? Get a Palm Pre.

Cloud computing seems to be an effort to return to ‘dumb’ terminals and mainframes elsewhere – to encourage users to rely on “the kindness of strangers” for their software, storage and privacy needs and away from their own personal computing and maintenance regimes. All very well and good, just so long as the company involved doesn’t go under, doesn’t change its syncing cooperation with your hardware provider or, doesn’t change its licensing conditions or, as the case recently with Kindle and Sidekick users, simply lose everything – or find themselves cut off from their servers, like with Palm’s WebOS.

Backups of cloud-based info is all very well and good, but often such restoration requires devices to sync with the failed service, or to migrate the whole works to a completely different (and sometimes incompatible)piece of software or service. Not so good.

Our desire to be fully mobile and have our ‘life’ fully accessible at all times means we are relying on hardware that is beyond our personal control. Problem is, sometimes those clouds can become a tornado.

I use GDocBackup to backup my Google Documents.

I use Evernote a lot and the Windows App has local backup and sync.
I also make sure that super important information is backed up separately.

I also export my blog and other Google settings once a week. My Google Calendar and Contacts are sync’d to my Palm Centro using Goosync.

Important emails are saved to Evernote for backup also.

And, my Palm Centro gets a hotsync every week.

Everything is backed up in multiple places. It’s the only way to go, cloud based or not.

The Palm Pre has that built-in backup, so many owners feel secure. What they don’t realize is it doesn’t back up any of the user’s data. All it backs up are the credentials for the various online services that the Pre is syncing up with. So if the online service goes kaput a la Sidekick, the Pre is lost. It doesn’t seem logical given the owner has been duly “backing up” the Pre since first run.

The key is to recognize where your data is really being kept and back that up. Of course, how do you back up Google? Gmail? It’s often not straightforward.