The Archives

Several Palm Pre customers have reported major problems with their handset’s online backup system, resulting in the loss of phone numbers, calendar events, memos and other data.

The issue stems from corrupted backups, according to Pre enthusiast blog PreCentral. The Pre backs up its data as a “Palm Profile” online, and it only stores the most recent backup. That means if the most recent backup becomes corrupt, Pre owners could not revert to an earlier, non-corrupt profile.

Some Palm Pre Profiles Get Lost in the Cloud

“We are seeing a small number of customers who have experienced issues transferring their Palm Profile information to another Palm webOS device,” a Palm spokesman said in a statement. “Palm and Sprint are working closely together to support these customers to successfully transfer their information to the new device.”

Though Palm says only a small number of customers were affected, the PreCentral blog said it had received several tips throughout the day suggesting this was a widespread issue. Recently, T-Mobile Sidekick owners faced a similar problem. Microsoft, T-Mobile and Danger hosted the data of all of T-Mobile’s Sidekick users in the cloud, and recently the server crashed, losing everything. These incidents are rare, but they underscore the risk of trusting a third party to secure your data over the web.