How to back up and restore Blackberry Phones Tutorial (Mac OS X)

Hello everybody.

In the last couple of days I ran into two friends of mine (each one at different time and place) and I noted that they were asking everybody around them for contact info like phone numbers, email addresses, PIN numbers, etc to put this info into their newly purchased Blackberry devices, because their old devices got lost or stolen. I told my friends there is a simple and easy way to avoid this kind of situations, backing up your phone just in case you upgrade to a new device or in the worst case scenario, if the phone got lost or stolen; obviously my friends didn't know about it, so I wonder why not create a simple tutorial on how to back up and restore your info from phone to phone. 

1) First of all you have to install the Blackberry Desktop Manager, either you have it in the installation CD included with your handheld or you can download it from the website www.blackberry.com. The first time I installed the app, I used the latter method because the installation CD provided is only for PC platforms and I use Mac, so this is how it looks once you are ready to download, click the "Download Now" button to download and install.

2) Once installed, run the application and connect your current handheld ( in this case I used a Blackberry Curve 8320) using the USB cable provided with your phone. The application then recognizes the phone immediately, showing your phone model, PIN number ( it is a unique number assigned to each Blackberry Phone) and even shows a picture of your model.

3) Now look for the Back Up icon on the upper right corner of your application. Just click it...

4) After you see the window where you confirm or change the destination folder where you want your back up files to be stored, the application will start backing up all your phone files, phone numbers, email addresses, pictures, videos, music, voice notes, internet bookmarks and history, even your ring tones settings. 

5) Once the backing up process dialog box is gone, your phone is fully backed up; at this stage you can eject your phone from the BB desktop manager (it is recommended you do these steps once in a while since you are constantly putting information in your device)

6) At this point you can have peace of mind, but in the case you upgrade to a new phone or as I mentioned before, the worst case scenarios, you won't regret you did those previous steps. Here is how:

Connect your brand new device ( in this case a new Blackberry Bold 9700) just like you did on step 2. Again, the desktop manager will tell you the handheld is connected...

7) Now comes the Real McCoy, click the restore icon also in the upper right corner.

8) A dialog box opens requesting you to identify which file would you like to restore ( in case you backed up more than one device in your computer) then click "restore" or press "enter"

9) Then you will see a dialog box displaying that your phone is being restored with the info from your previous phone.

10) Voila, you have your new phone with all the setting and files from your past phone restored in it. Now you can click the eject button in the bottom right corner of the desktop manager.

Hope this simple tutorial helps you keep all your phone files ready when needed, we all know how bad is to lose a phone but losing what's in it is worse. As a recommendation you can set your phone to be password protected at all times to avoid ID theft just in case.