lol, sorry about that... that was my bad.  The posting I did today was right though. :)

the "pim thing" does work and it does safe contacts as well as scheduled events.  I've done it with my touch twice, my wife's touch twice and it worked with my other pocket pc phones. 

All I did was copy the pim file to my desktop - do what ever I need to do to the phone (e.g. install 6.1) - rename the pim file on the phone to pim1 - copy the pim from my desktop to the phone - delete the pim1 file - soft reset - your done. 

lol no worries Akera. I got it to work but for some reason my contacts didnt come over from the original pim so thats why i thought it wasnt working. I'm not sure why but I started to add my contacts back one by one and i tried the pim replacement and it restored the ones i just added, so it definitely works but my contacts didnt get restored the first time which was a pain in the butt but my appointments and tasks did which was weird.

This is wonderful! I found this thread earlier today and randomly just saved the pim on my storage card. Then, later, I was trying to sync my device using Windows Mobile Device Center and the stupid thing deleted my contacts, tasks, calendar, everything from my phone!

Thankfully, I was able to restore everything by bringing over the copied pim file.

Something to add to this backup, in my searching, I found this pim backup and restore program that works so well. It not only stores your contacts and calendar info, but it also stores your text messages, call log, tasks, speed dials, etc.

http://www.darrenstraight.com/blog/2007/08/03/backup-and-restore-text-messages-on-windows-mobile-devices-using-pim-backup/

One suggestion, store the program and backup folder on your storage card to be sure if anything happens to your phone, you still have the backup info.