Back to Square One with my Blackberry

I have made a few posts about my Blackberry and all the things that I use it for and what happens when it recycles itself at inopportune times. But this past week, my BB did the unthinkable as it had a major software meltdown.

My Bold started its decent into death with the battery lasting less and less over a period of a couple of days. During this time it also seemed slower to wake up from a locked status.

I figured that perhaps the battery was just going or perhaps all of the apps and data I had put on it were too much for its internal memory.

I called my support guy and asked him to get me a new battery, which he was glad to do. He also mentioned that he had seen some cases where apps were not truly closing out when you think you are exiting them. He suggested pulling the battery was a way to ensure all of the apps were actually closed.

As this was a reasonable request, and one I had a number of times in the past, when my BB locked itself up, I pulled the battery. After a few minutes of temporary "BB death", I popped the battery back in and waited for it complete its start-up process. It went through its normal process and just when it looked like it was ready to be back to full life, it would recycle itself again and again.

After repeating this process a couple of times, I knew my BB was pretty close to a permanent death. I reached back out for help and was told to find a PC with the BB sync software installed and try and sync my BB.

This is much harder then it used to be as Blackberry's can do pretty much everything over the air so why sync it to a PC. Anyway finally found an IT guy with the software and started the sync process.

The good news is the sync process stopped they recycling process, but in the process updated the software on my BB. This update gave me back a functional BB; unfortunately, this functionality was limited to the out of the box BB, leaving me with just BB email, calendaring and contacts.

This allowed me to get my corporate email and all of my contacts from Outlook back, but gone were the other functions and personalization that I had added over time to the BB. Gone were Gvoice, Gmail, Yammer, Facebook, Twitter, Navigation apps, bluetooth settings, sound settings, pictures and all of the other changes I had made to it to make it work for me. Of course I can't say to make it "mine" as it is a corporate BB and thus belongs to my company, but I did the best to make me as effective as possible within the spirit (if not the letter) of my company's policies.

The good news is no data has been lost from a corporate or personal perspective, but it is going to take some time to reinstall all of the apps and redo all of the settings and configurations.

Haven't started this process yet as I want to make sure that whatever was ailing my BB is indeed gone, but next week, I will begin the process, slowly at first, and perhaps not all of what I had will be reinstalled.

Because you can't really backup a BB's image, it will never really be the same as I don't really have an inventory of apps and settings, but I will get it back to something that works for me again.

The lessons of having all of these eggs in my BB basket are not lost on me and hopefully something all of you will think about as well.