PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide, Second Edition

Mastering the User-Named Folders

As you know, the PalmPilot stores its data entirely in RAM. But your desktop computer—Palm Desktop—manages to retain all your data even when the computer’s turned off. Where is the data stored?

Learning the answer to this question can make you much wiser and wilier. You’ll be able to manipulate PalmPilot data in surprising ways, troubleshoot, back up more effectively, and pull off sneaky stunts to amaze your friends.

It turns out that Palm Desktop stores your PalmPilot’s data on the hard drive, right there in the Palm folder. If you’ve ever performed a HotSync to your PC, you can check this out right now—open the Palm folder on your hard drive (on the Mac, these folders are inside the Users folder). Inside, you’ll see that the HotSync software maintains a separate folder for each PalmPilot user. In each user’s folder are additional folders, one for each PalmPilot program. See the extremely important Figure 6.11 for proof.

Figure 6-11. On your hard drive, inside the Palm folder, lurk individual folders for each Palm user (top). In this example, Kellyman, Alyce, dp, and Frank’s Palm V store the data for four different PalmPilots. Within each user-named folder are more folders, one for each Palm program: Address Book, Memo Pad, and so on (bottom). (On the Mac, the user-named folders are inside the Users folder.)

Here, for example, are the standard ...