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Desktop Manager 4.6 Now Makes Sense – Sort Of

by Ronen Halevy on Aug 21st, 2008 at 5:33 am EST
8 Comments »
 

Josep spotted this article on RIM’s knowledgebase that finally explains one reason for the difference between Desktop Manager 4.5 & 4.6. I was curious because the versions are very similar…

Turns out that with Desktop Manager 4.6 you now have the ability to backup and restore the internal device memory. It also gives access to the internal memory to the media application. Now this might not make much sense for current devices which have a puny amount of device memory but Bold has 1GB of device memory… (The shiny bulb over my head went off when I understood that)

Turns out that the backup and restore functions now output two different files during the process:

  • an .ipd file which is the backup file for BlackBerry Desktop Manager
  • a compressed file of the Device Memory

They due mention that due to the large potential size (1GB) of the internal memory this process may now take longer.

You can read the full knowledgebase article at this link.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 and is filed under News.

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8 Comments to “Desktop Manager 4.6 Now Makes Sense – Sort Of”

  1. Posted by: John
    August 21, 2008 at 8:31 am EST

    I don’t fully understand this.

    On my 8300, at least, the internal memory is already backed up (it’s the ‘Content store’ right?). Certainkly when I restore from a backup, EVERYTHING seems to be restored from the .ipd file.

    Do the newer devices with ‘Device Memory’ implement that as a ‘virtual SD card’ which is thus separate and requires backing up separately from the ‘Device Memory’ that I have in my 8300?

    And I just did a backup of the 8300 using DM 4.6. I made one .ipd file, despite having the setting to back up device memory ticked.

    All rather confusing…

  2. Posted by: Andrew
    August 21, 2008 at 8:35 am EST

    That’s what I was thinking. What does the writer of the article mean by “you now have the ability to backup and restore the internal device memory”? and then talking about .ipd files? Last I checked, this was available in old DM.

    DM 4.3 and 4.5 all allow you to save everything on the internal memory (for example, when you install new OS, everything is backed up and restored)

    Rather confusing, this article…

  3. Posted by: John
    August 21, 2008 at 9:20 am EST

    It’s not the original author of the post – RIM’s own KB article says

    ===

    if the option Backup device memory content is checked (defaults to checked) the Device Memory on the BlackBerry smartphone is backed up as part of the backup process. The backup process creates two files

    * an .ipd file which is the backup file for BlackBerry Desktop Manager
    * a compressed file of the Device Memory

    ===

    On an 8300, at least, selecting or deselecting the option makes no difference. The resulting .ipd file is the same size. Maybe, for later devices, what is currently the ‘Content Store’ (media I think) is stored separately and now has this option to ignore. Funny that it’s compressed too. I’d expect it to be mainly .jpg’s and mp3’s which gererally don’t further rcompress anyway!

  4. Posted by: Ronen Halevy
    August 21, 2008 at 9:39 am EST

    Sorry for the confusion guys. I was just pointing out that the difference between 4.6 and 4.5 is support for built in memory storage. Before that I could not see any difference between 4.5 and 4.6. For now that means the extra 1gb of space on the Bold and other upcoming devices. This extra space was not backed up anywhere and the ability to interact with it is limited to DM 4.6.

  5. Posted by: John
    August 21, 2008 at 10:15 am EST

    So on a Bold, what does this extra 1GB storage look like to the user? Is it in addition to the “In Device Memory” option I see when selecting where to save my camera pictures on my 8300, for example? Or is it still called “In Device Memory”, which is now saved separately, whereas before it was saved as part of the .ipd backup file?

  6. Posted by: Richard Wood
    August 21, 2008 at 10:36 am EST

    One big difference I noticed between DM 4.5 & 4.6 is the ability to minimize to tray, which disappeared after v4.2.

    Am I mental? This IS the biggest improvement to me! :)

  7. Posted by: Jeff
    August 21, 2008 at 4:24 pm EST

    I’m using DM 4.5 and it minimizes to the Windows tray (the area where clock is).

  8. Posted by: larry
    September 22, 2008 at 11:38 pm EST

    Does 4.6 use less RAM? It appears that 4.5 takes up more than 160Mb. That seems absurdly high.