What a nightmare restoring a pocketpc is. After my previous hard reset and reinstalling the apps on the pocketpc I realised I didn’t have access to the notes, contacts or diary in the pocketpc. This didn’t use to be a problem as all the data was synched up to my outlook account, but now that I am on my home pc I don’t use outlook – and therefore no computer based backup of the data. It would have been possible to restore the data from the pocketpc backup that I had taken but this would roll me back to the state where MediaPlayer would not launch so that wasn’t really what I wanted. It took about an hour of searching in google but eventually I came across Sunnysoft’s backup manager that enables you to backup your pocketpc and more importantly do a selective restore. I restored the full backup from the pocketpc backup, then used Sunnysoft to backup the data to the SD card and make the backup an executable (a VERY smart feature). I then hard reset the axim, installed the applications that I had previously installed with this computer (which is very easy as I just had to reselect the programs within activesync) and then double clicked on sunnysofts backup file. I then said No to restoring everything, selected the tasks, contacts, calendar and all of my documents and a minute or so later I was prompted to reboot and the pocketpc is back to a fully functioning state.
Backup manager is a free trial download (and saved my bacon) and is usable for 14 days after which you need to register. This application also has the ability to automatically copy the backups over to the pc for further offline backup.