PalmOS provides an effective and well debugged process for storing an image of the PDA's memory on a host computer's disk. Called 'Hotsync', this stores all the basic data held in the PDA to a user directory on the host.

If the host is an Apple OS-X computer, the backups are stored to…

/Users/<username>/Documents/Palm/Users/<devicename>

In the above path, <username> stands for the user performing the hotsync and <devicename> stands for the name given to the device when first Hotsynced with the host. As this suggests, many devices may be synchronised with a single host.

Under this path may be found various directories and individual files.

Several Palm devices, as well as some from other manufacturers, are fitted with a SD card slot. Palm does not supply software to save the PDA's memory to a card, which may seem a strange omission. Fortunately, others have taken up the challenge. There are various programs available, some of which are free. NvBackup is both free and effective.

If you wish to maintain snapshots of the device for future reference, or to restore to a known condition, simply copy (not move) the contents of the device's backup directory to one above the level of the backup. I store my backups in the path…

/Users/<username>/Documents/Palm/History/<devicename>_CCYYMMDD

…where CCYYMMDD is the date on which the hotsync was performed.

If you wish to copy all the data in one PDA to a second PDA, the simplest procedure is…

1. Perform an initial Hotsync of the target device.
2. Delete all the contents of the target device's backup directory.
3. Hotsync the source device.
4. Copy all the contents from the source device's backup directory to the target device's backup directory.
5. Hotsync the target device.

…which should give you an exact clone of the source PDA.