Microsoft Myphone as a Potential WinMo backup solution

[ldolse]

In the process of setting up my new phone I discovered Microsoft has launched a new service called MyPhone in conjunction with the release of 6.5 to back up documents, texts, etc online. It's currently in beta, and also available to 6.1 users. Overall it seems to work really well. The only problem is it doesn't back up Pleco databases

Here's a quote from the MS forums on the extensions that are automatically backed up:

To be included in a sync with your web account, your photos, music, videos, and documents must be located:

1. In the My Documents folder (or one of its subdirectories) on the phone
2. On the memory card (if selected).

Below, you'll find a complete list of file extensions that are synced by My Phone.

Photos: jpg, jpeg, gif, png, tif, fit, wbmp, bmp, opl, n3a, ota
Music: mp3, aif, mid, amr, aac, au, awb, dm, m4a, midi, mp1, mp2, mpa, ogg, ram, rng, wav, wma, wve
Videos: 3pg, 3gpp, mp4, avi, wmv, mpg, mpeg
Documents: doc, docx, xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx, pdf, txt, 1sp, rtf, html, htm, wks, wps, wdb

Is there any specific file type that you're not successfully backing up?

Maybe Pleco could use/support one of these extensions on WinMo so that the user DBs are automatically backed up using the new service? The alternative would be to convince MS to add pqb...

 

[mikelove]

I'd be a bit worried about faking one of those file extensions, actually, because if Myphone is designed to back up only those specific types of data there's a chance they might try to convert / open / otherwise alter files once they're uploaded (even if just to, say, alter one of the dates in the file header), and that could end up mangling a Pleco-database-file-masquerading-as-an-MP3. Or even if it wasn't mangled on Microsoft's end, when someone tried to download it from Myphone their web browser might be configured to open it / display it rather than saving it.

There's also of course the problem it presents for Pleco's startup file opening sequence - right now it basically scans through most of the WM file system looking for .pqb files and tries to open every one that it encounters. The first thing it does when it opens a file is check that it's in SQLite format (has the all-important "SQLite Format 3" header), so if it tried to open every MP3 or AVI or whatever on the system it wouldn't actually end up treating them as databases, but if someone had hundreds or thousands of those files it could make startup very slow.

Now all of these could probably be worked around - multiple file extension options would fix the latter (since it's unlikely someone would have lots of examples of every one of those formats on their handheld), and with the former we'd just default to a relatively-obscure format like .amr and hope most people's browsers wouldn't interpret that, but the resulting system would be technically intimidating enough that I don't imagine very many people would end up using it.