Pocket PC Thoughts: Keepin' to the Bright Side of Life with Sunnysoft Backup Manager 4.0

Introduction
To my mind, Activesync has never been a workable backup/restore solution for the Pocket PC. It took far too restrictive a view in providing only catastrophic-recovery capability. And my experience with hardware-vendor supplied backup solutions hasn't been great, either (e.g. The Dell Axim Data Backup utility). Thank goodness vendors like Sprite, Spb and Sunnysoft have stepped in to fill the void by providing simple to use and effective backup/restore applications.

Sunnysoft was one of the first to provide a backup application for Pocket PCs and it's clear from the version history on Backup Manager that they haven't been sitting on their laurels. The latest version, Backup Manager 4, provides a considerable list of fixes and enhancements from the previous 3.7 version. It also includes some features not available in competitor's products, such as background operation and battery-level monitoring/initiation.

Installation
Installation of Backup Manager can be accomplished either by the typical Activesync-connected executable from your desktop, or by a directly downloadable .CAB file which can be executed on the PPC. In both cases, installation proceeded quickly (since this is a fairly small application) and without any difficulties. Although it is possible to install and run the application from a storage card, my preference is to run it from the device memory. If you install the demo version from the Sunnysoft site, you will get 7 days from the date of installation to test a fully functioning version of the application.

Unfortunately, activation/registration of Backup Manager was not as straightforward. After you install the product, you need to find the registration name (available from the Menu/Register menu or displayed during the install process) which is a 16 hex-digit number in 8 pairs. In order to activate the product (if you ordered online), this number needs to be typed into the Sunnysoft website in order to have it email you the Registration Key (another 16 hex-digits in 4 groups of 4 digits). Once the Registration Key is received, it needs to be typed into the appropriate fields in Backup Manager to activate the product.

I realize that some sort of registration confirmation is required, but typing in multiple 16-digit numbers seems a bit tedious. According to the Sunnysoft documentation, if you purchase the software, you get both the Registration name and key at the same time and all you have to input is the Registration/Activation key at install time, if you are using the PC-based routine.

Backup Manager provides two modes of operation: Simple, which provides only full backups and restores; and Advanced which provides much more control over not only what to backup, but when and how often.