Windows Phone Thoughts: Saving Your Bacon with Spb Backup 1.0

Options for compression and encryption of the backup are available at any time from the Options selection of the Tools menu.


Figure 6: Spb Backup Options.

Once all the selections have been made and you tap on Next to continue, Spb Backup provides an estimate of the size of the Backup file. This estimate is produced very quickly – usually in less than 5 seconds, which is a nice change from what happens with Dell’s Data Backup utility.


Figure 7: Estimate of Backup file size.

I also found the backup file sizes to be considerably smaller than those of Dell’s Data Backup or Sprite Backup (beta for WM5) – sometimes by almost half! And neither of the other two produce executable extraction modules! After accepting the estimate and tapping Next, a warning is displayed that Spb Backup will be shutting down all background processes.


Figure 8: Background processes being shut down. Unfortunately, because all background processes are halted, I wasn’t able to screen capture the actual backup in progress.

And now, onto the actual backup! Once started, the actual backup of the system only took about 2 minutes. I was a bit surprised, since I was used to other utilities taking 10 minutes or longer. (Did it really get everything?). Unfortunately, because I had my unit attached to the laptop, Activesync did its usual thing and attempted to run synchronization during the backup, producing a log with 20 or 30 errors. The log file is a text file which is loaded in the same location as the backup, using the same file name, but with a .txt extension.

After the backup is completed, Spb Backup requires the unit to be soft reset and provides a button to do this for you. I’m not exactly sure why this reset is required, but Sprite Backup does the same thing, except they do it both before and after the backup. So, after the reset was completed, I did another soft reset, just to be sure, then located the backup file and double-tapped it to do a restore.


Figure 9: Running the backup executable for restore. No, I didn’t run the backup that early in the morning! It's been fixed in the 1606 build.

Next comes the selection of whether you want to do a full restore or a partial, selecting specific files or folders.


Figure 10: Full Restore or Partial?

Tapping Next starts up the restore process. In this trial, I got an error message saying that “Spb Backup was unable to read the data stream” and the “Backup file may be damaged”. Hmmm, a bit disconcerting, but I decided to proceed anyway. As with Backup, a progress bar shows where you are in the Restore, and it “Completed with no errors.” – go figure – taking about 5 minutes.

Again, a soft reset is required after completion of the restore, and I’m happy to announce that everything looked exactly as it did before. Even Activesync didn’t try to re-synchronize all 5000 or so of my calendar entries!