We were recently approached by a concerned father. His daughter, a medical resident destined for Alaska, had lost much of the data on her Palm device. Could we help? We're not a tech support team, but Senior Techical Editor Claire Pieterek sent some suggestions and the caring Dad managed to recover some of the lost data. Might you have a similar problem some day? If so, here are some ideas you might use. Of course, to avoid the problem as much as possible, backup and HotSync regularly.

Here's the story: My oldest daughter is finishing her third year in pediatric residency at Johns Hopkins. About a year ago, I encouraged her to buy a PalmPilot since I love mine so much. She did, and has also fallen in love with it -- putting all of her patient notes, diagnostic clues, and other vital information on it. These are not only very important to her day-to-day life, but are also resources she intended to rely on when she begins her two-year stint in Alaska in July. She will be the only pediatrician in a remote area the size of Ohio and will need all of the help she can muster.

Unfortunately, the computer she was synchronizing her PalmPilot on died an untimely death back in November. Being a Resident (and thus not well paid) she couldn't afford a new computer and kept on taking notes without any backup. This was making us both nervous. This past weekend, my wife and I visited her in Baltimore and helped her buy a new laptop. The first order of business was to install her Palm Desktop software and synchronize. The unthinkable happened -- the memory of her Palm Pilot was apparently reinitialized and there is no information showing. Everything was lost. She is devastated and I am too.

Here's my hope against hope. I know enough about computer software and databases to know that they are typically list-driven. I'm hoping that rather than actually being erased, the data is still actually resident in the Palm device, but just not accessible. I'm hoping that someone who has the tools and knows how to do it might restore the raw data. I'll gladly pay any reasonable amount if this can be done or attempted. I'm hoping that, with your connections to the community of PalmPilot technologists, you might know someone who can either accomplish this task, or end my agony by assuring me that it is not possible.