Of course, I had already contacted the Palm service center and was of course told that "the data is gone", but my own experience as a technologist tells me that this may not actually be the whole story. I will try again on Monday and hope to reach someone more knowledgeable -- but I am hoping that someone here might be able to help. I would be most appreciative of any help you can give me -- if you can point me to someone who might be able to help, I will be eternally grateful.

Sincerely,
Frederick Schamber
fhscham@sgi.net

Senior Technical Editor Claire Pieterek answers
Denise Amrich (managing editor of PalmPower) forwarded your message to me. Does your daughter still have the old PC, by any chance? There may be a way of salvaging the data from it, depending on what happened. ("It died" unfortunately isn't specific enough for me to even guess what needs to be done. In Real Life, I do everything from designing and building networks to PC support.)

[One thing I always make sure of when I want to backup to a new machine is that I custom configure the HotSync so that "Handheld Overwrites Desktop" is set for all of the big four applications. I've never had a problem with all the data ending up in my Palm Desktop. Mr. Schamber didn't say whether or not this was done. I'm assuming it was, since some of the data arrived intact. --DA]

Otherwise, please call your daughter and tell her not to HotSync the device again. There may be a chance that the data is intact on the new PC. When you perform a HotSync operation, two files are created for each of the built-in applications (the built-in applications are, of course, Address List, Memo Pad, To Do List, and Date Book). These created files can be found in the C:\PALM\USERNAME directory (where USERNAME is her Palm device's username), in the directories ADDRESS, MEMOPAD, TODO, and DATEBOOK. One will be named yourdaughtername.DAT, the other will be named yourdaughtername.BAK. It's possible that the .BAK files may still contain her data if she has not performed more than one HotSync.

Using Windows Explorer, she can navigate to the C:\PALM\ USERNAME directory. In each of the directories for the built-in apps, rename the .DAT entry to yourdaughtername.OLD and rename the yourdaughtername.BAK entry to yourdaughtername.DAT.

Here's an example of what the USERNAME directory looks like, using DOS. My USERNAME directory is "PieterC":

Here's an example of what the USERNAME\DATEBOOK directory looks like, using DOS: