Q&A How to Backup your 3rd party applications to your PC

Ever do an OS upgrade on your BB and worry that your 3rd party applications will be forever lost if you mess up? You are in luck because there is now a way to backup all your applications to your PC from your BlackBerry. Even those applications that you have downloaded OTA (Over the air).

Our friend EVO gave us simple step by step instructions on how to to this and will show you today.

1. Run Desktop Manager and connect your Berry to your computer.

2. Once the phone is connected  click on the Switch device wizard icon and it will take you to the screen shown above. Click Start and it will take you to the next picture where you have some options. Only check the option where it says backup 3rd party applications and hit next.  This will begin the process of backing up all your 3rd party applications to a temporary folder on you PC. This is the most important part.

3. Once all your applications have been back up to your PC temporarily a screen will pop up asking you to plug in the new device (see image above). Do not unplug your phone yet! This is very important since if you unplug your phone the temporary file might disappear. Do not hit cancel on this screen and just leave your phone plugged into the computer and minimize desktop manger.

4. Now go to your Start menu and then select Search/all Files and Folders

when you get to the search screen select your computers main drive usually is “C” drive and on the bottom make sure you select More advance options and check the following options are checked: Search hidden Files and Folders, & Search case sensitive.

Now go to the search field and type in your Blackberry’s PIN number. The file you are looking for will be named the same as your PIN number. Hit search and wait about a minute or so for the search query to find the folder. Once the folder is found click on the folder and copy it to another location on your hard drive.

This folder will contain all your 3rd party applications along with an .alx file that has all the instructions to tell the DM how reload all your files to your Blackberry in case you were to loose them. If you know how to edit this type of files you can delete the ones you don’t want and leave what you need. I suggest that you not mess with it if you don’t know what you are doing. If you feel like messing with it anyways just just make a separate copy of the file and edit that.

Have fun. This is a fairly simple and fast procedure.