Backing Up Your BlackBerry

Its good practice if you're doing regular backups of your BlackBerry information. Like your e-mail, calendar, and contact information is probably synchronized with your desktop or enterprise server on a regular basis, but it can still be terribly inconvenient to lose data you’ve added since your last synchronization. As a simple example, if you travel for any extended period of time, it can be days or even weeks between synchronization sessions, and if you were to lose, drop, or damage your handheld at any point during that time, you would also potentially lose critically important data.

Aside from disaster protection, you should perform a safety backup of your BlackBerry prior to performing an installation of any BlackBerry system/firmware updates — just in case something goes wrong. It is also a good idea to do a backup before you install any additional application programs or software on your device.

Full Backups
BlackBerry devices do not support any kind of expansion memory card.To perform a full
backup:

1. Connect your BlackBerry to your desktop PC using the supplied USB cable or cradle.
2. Run the BlackBerry Desktop Manager application on your PC, and double-click the Backup and Restore icon from the main screen.
3. From the Backup and Restore screen, click the Backup button, and choose a name and location for your backup file. Backup files use an .ipd extension, so a good convention might be to incorporate the backup date into the filename, such as 10-31-2005.ipd.

Selective Backups
Instead of backing up all of your handheld data, you can be more choosy about what gets backed up by using selective backup, which lets you choose exactly which application databases get backed up. So if, for example, you care only about backing up your Calendar data, you can speed up the backup by ignoring all of the other data on your handheld. To perform a selective backup:

1. Connect your BlackBerry to your desktop PC using the supplied USB cable or cradle.
2. Run the BlackBerry Desktop Manager application on your PC, and double-click the Backup and Restore icon from the main screen. This brings up the Backup and Restore screen.
3. Click the Advanced button to see a list of available databases.
4. Check each database that you wish to back up.
5. Choose File Save As to begin the backup to a filename and location of your choosing.

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