Palm Programming: The Developer's Guide

Using the Backup Conduit

You may have an application that doesn’t require its own conduit. In such cases, you can rely on the Backup conduit. First, let’s discuss the types of applications that can profitably use this approach and then tell you what you need to do to your application.

The Backup conduit works on any application’s database that:

• Has no other conduit

• Has the backup flag set

• Has been modified since the last sync

Whenever the Backup conduit is used, the data in the database is completely copied from the Palm device to the desktop and saved as a PDB (database) or PRC (application) file. This type of backup occurs during every sync, which is why you don’t want to use this as a solution for large databases or most applications.

Applications That Might Use the Backup Conduit

The Backup conduit is well suited to the following types of applications:

Games

Where you save top score information

Utilities

Where you save some user settings

Alarm clocks or other timers

Where you save world clock information or other types of alarm settings

Electronic books

Where you save display information, bookmarks, or the books themselves

Newsreaders

Where you save newsgroup lists

Using System Prefs Instead

Another approach for these types of applications is to use the System Prefs database. This database contains a record for each application that stores preferences. These preferences are automatically backed up because the Systems Prefs database has the backup bit set.

Note

Actually, when you create system ...