BlackBerry® Torch™

[jdulnuan]

this is regarding my bb torch 9800

i just did an update directly from the bb website and NOT from a desktop icon.

all i did was connect the phone and pressed "check for updates", from which the results said that there was an update available.

it never once asked me to do a system backup...just told me that this could take up to an hour and that i'd be unable to use the phone.

all my contacts are gone. this is my first bb so clearly i had no clue about doing a sync to my sim card.

is there any way that i can save all that lost contact info? please help.

[sdgardne]

Hi and Welcome to the Community!

It has been a long time since I've used that method (I don't trust it, and you may have learned the hard way the same lesson), but search the hard drive of the computer you used to do this update for files with IPD or BBB extension (*.IPD and *.BBB). If you find any and the date/time stamp is around when you did this update, then a backup was taken, and you should be able to use that as the source for restore:

• KB10339 How to use BlackBerry Desktop Software to restore data to a BlackBerry smartphone from a backup file

Restoring is a matter of having a source to do so, and the BB itself can never be that source, so there must be some external source of data. If you have none, then you will have migrated from the latter to the former of this old saying:

• There are two kinds of computing device users -- those who have lost data, and those who will

Backups, like insurance, are neither a reactive nor an optional activity.

Here is the process I normally recommend:

Daily -- configure the FREE BB Protect app to backup your data to "the cloud", telling it to only use WiFi if you are concerned about carrier data network charges.

Weekly:

1. Backup your BBM Contacts to either Device or Media Card Memory:
1. KB20554 How to back up and restore the BlackBerry Messenger contact list
2. Manually copy the entire contents of your Device and Media Card Memory to your computer:
1. KB11879 What is mass storage mode
3. Use the FREE Desktop Software to conduct a full backup to your computer:
1. KB12487 How to back up BlackBerry smartphone data using BlackBerry Desktop Software for Windows

With that, you should be set to recover from any catastrophic event. If you further use a PC-based app (e.g., Outlook), you can also synchronize that data with your BB, providing yet another layer of data protection. Consider it this way...the device itself is a mere commodity; the data on the device, that is priceless, and deserves all of the protection we can utilize.

As for your thought of using your SIM card as a backup location, that's actually not as useful as one might think. The BB Contact List is very robust, while the SIM card contact list is very basic. With the BB Contact List, you can have one contact entry with multiple phone numbers. But, the SIM card list can have only one entry with one phone number. Hence, the SIM card phone book would result in multiple "same name" entries, one for each phone number of that entry in your BB Contact List. Partially due to this limitation, the BB provides no automated method to copy your entire Contact List to the SIM...rather, you must manually do it one phone number at a time...very tedious. The above backup methods are much more robust, and would preserve the rich content of the BB Contact List.

Good luck and let us know!