In the drive that you have installed your PalmPilot Desktop software, find the PILOT directory (or if you are a Mac user, Pilot Desktop 1.0 folder). When you open this directory, you should find a folder that has a name close to your user name. The usually looks like a combination of your last name, followed by your first initial. For example, my user name, Chris Brown, would be shortened to "BrownC".

This user name directory should contain several folders. The number of these will vary based on what applications you use with your PalmPilot organizer either loaded onto the device itself or run off of your PC. There are a few directories, however, that should always be included in your user name directory regardless of your version of Pilot Desktop or PalmPilot Desktop. Look for these folders: ADDRESS, DATEBOOK, MEMOPAD, TODO.

Inside of these folders, you will find files marked .BAK and .DAT. The names of these files correspond to the name of the directory they are found in, as well as each other. For example, you'll be able to find DATEBOOK.BAK and DATEBOOK.DAT files inside of your DATEBOOK directory. Make sense? Take a look, you'll know what I mean. Smart as you are, you can probably already guess that the DATEBOOK.DAT file contains the data that PalmPilot Desktop uses for the Date Book application, and the DATEBOOK.BAK file is the backup of this file.

When would you use these files? Well, if you find that the data on your PalmPilot organizer and PalmPilot Desktop have some weird inconsistencies or garbage that you know that you haven't entered yourself, you might diagnose this as a case of corrupted data. This is a rare occurrence, so if you don't know what I am talking about you've probably never seen it.

To illustrate, when I was looking for a friend's address on my PalmPilot Professional Edition, I found a bunch of gobbledy-gook under his name and phone number. I didn't even know the Graffiti strokes for some of the characters I saw, much less how to enter them with a keyboard on my PC. I was definitely suspicious. I checked PalmPilot Desktop on my PC, the record was different, but I wasn't convinced that everything else was okay. When I kept getting a "fatal error" when I clicked the Edit button to correct the erroneous record, I knew something was wrong.

Another way a case of corrupted data may rear its ugly head is if you perform a HotSync and the connection suddenly drops for no good reason. You probably have data corruption that your HotSync Manager did not know how to resolve. If you've seen something like the above two examples, your data files may be candidates for a transplant, with your .BAK files as the donors.

Transplant surgery
The secret of restoring your data is catching the problem early. As soon as you notice the problem, do something about it. You don't want it to be too late to completely cure the disease if it has already spread to your healthy backup files. It is for this reason that you should not try to HotSync before you use the backup files.