So you have finished all the levels on Angry Birds, have all your feeds set up in DrPodder and spent the better part of a week setting up Mode Switcher just right, but now it’s time for you to swap out your phone for an upgrade or to run the webOS Doctor. You are worried that you will lose all the progress you made in your games or reset all of your system and application preferences, and for good reason. The Palm Backup app only backs up certain aspects of your Palm Profile (as documented on this Palm Support article), and none of your application data is included in that backup. Luckily, the geniuses at WebOS Internals created the Save/Restore app to backup that data.

You can refer to this PreCentral article on Save/Restore for more complete details on how to use the app, or continue reading after the break for some key notes about Save/Restore and the exact steps you should follow when backing up and then restoring your device.

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Back in April, we reported on a new app that was just hitting the WebOS-Internal’s testing feed called Save/Restore. The app was designed to help you restore all of your applications’ saved data and preferences after wiping your phone from a visit to the webOS Doctor or after a phone replacement. While still not officially at v1.0, the application has been in the production feeds for a few months now has been a great success and has seen some major enhancements. But before we talk about those enhancements, let’s give a quick recap on what Save/Restore actually does and why it’s necessary.

Keep reading after the break!

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Since the next two days are dedicated to Palm’s own development news, we figured today would be a good day for some updates on what’s happening in the homebrew community. We just told you about Jason’s (happy birthday!) webOS file manager app and service, now it’s time for another project with wide appeal.

You know the drill: you replace your Pre or you find a need to run the webOS Doctor to wipe it clean and start from scratch, then you go through the motions of reinstalling all your apps. One problem: your saved data from many/most of those apps isn’t backed up to Palm’s servers. All that very important effort you’ve put into Let’s Golf? Gone.

Enter Save/Restore, which allows you to save data from applications to storage on your Pre, from whence you can move that data to another device, back it up to your computer, and then restore it again. Save/Restore doesn’t automatically save all the data from every app, rather support for each app needs to be built in manually. However the group has gone ahead and added support for many of the big, important apps. Webos Internals calls it the ‘Holy Grail of homebrew‘ and while we might not go quite that far, it does sound pretty sweet!

If you’re interested in helping with the testing, you’ll need to do a little legwork to install Preware Alpha and the Save/Restore App – more info here and here, be sure to read about the bounty system for adding additional app support. Otherwise, sit tight, the good folks at Webos Internals and the crew of homebrewers doing additional testing are moving things along at a heady clip.

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Now that Bell Palm Pre users have gotten the webOS 1.2.1 update, it was just a matter before Palm released the 1.2.1 webOS Doctor.  So today, with the release of the updated webOS Doctor, it was only fitting to update another recovery type of program, the totally-unofficial WebOS Repair Utility.

We previously covered the initial release of WebOS Repair Utility two and a half weeks ago and it’s come pretty far since then. For those unaware, WebOS Repair Utility can scan the program files of your device, comparing them to the stock files in webOS Doctor, and offering the ability to restore conflicting or missing files. The big advantage being that it doesn’t wipe your personal data and settings, like using webOS Doctor would. Here’s what you’ll find new in the latest version:

v1.6 – October 10, 2009

• Updated for v1.2.1 webOS Doctor
  
• Better first-usage handling of webOS Doctor
  
• Faster filechooser loading
  
• Distinct separate md5sum lists for Sprint and Bell
  
• Now properly handles the WebOS Internals patching system
  
• Wider layout
  
• Now able to fully handle exiting mid-scan

The big two changes worth recognition are that it’s fully webOS 1.2.1 compatible (so no more having to doctor back to 1.2.0; you can give WebOS Repair Utility a chance and if it doesn’t solve the problem, you can always use the new webOS Doctor to get back to 1.2.1) and almost as important, this new version is fully compatible with the WebOS Internals patching system. This means means not only that scans will avoid properly patched files, but they’ll also check on the well being of the file backups.

Always good to have options during sticky situations!

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