[Sukaritat]

Hi folks.
Looking for some expert advice to a novel problem. The BBPP was my primary phone while I was living in Asia for the last few years and I want to keep the phone and sim active while I am in exile back in the US. However, I really need to have the phone there in Asia to make that happen as the bill needs to be paid every few months and lots of "services" need to be verified using a text. (I can get someone to walk in and pay the bill without the phone there I think, but I don't want to rely on that.) So for those reasons, I want to just ship the phone to a friend there and have them "man" it for me in the form of paying the bill every three months so I don't lose the number and perhaps sending me approval texts when I try to purchase things from asian online website that use the phone to authenticate purchases, etc., until I return there to live or visit.

BUT....before I send away my beloved Passport, I would like a copy of the data that I have on it for reference. Since I have been back in the US, I haven't put cell service on it but I do connect it to wifi and use it to surf the web because I enjoy the big screen. Also, I use it to read email and mostly it is a repository for all sorts of good stuff I have collected over the years (screenshots, pdfs, phots)...things that my brain has encoded as stored and available to me via my Blackberry. I may have backups of important stuff somewhere else, but honestly a lot of helpful bits of info are on my Blackberry. Therefore, I thought maybe I could buy a new Blackberry (new to me, used in real life) and clone my Asian Passport info to the new one before sending the Blackberry back to Asia until I could reunite with it again. And being able to reunite with it is important because my identity in my adopted homeland is very tied to my phone number. There one's phone number almost exists like a national ID. I want to keep that number and it is convenient to have it working upon landing at the airport upon my return (which I would facilitate by having the phone returned to me in the US shortly before I planned to return to Asia so that I could carry it with me on the plane or maybe it is possible to get a copy of the sim (with the same number -- is that possible -- while in Asia, I have lost a sim before received a new one while keeping the same telephone number.) That way I could have the SIM clone in US and pop into a phone I turn on when I return. (Or would two phones with the same sim working at the same time in the same country violate some sort of law of the universe?)

So that is my quandary...how to clone my Passport...I know there is some way to TRANSFER info from an old Blackberry to a new one but what about my need to copy info from one Passport to an empty Passport. Is there a cable that I can use to connect the two devices together similar to the way that Samsung has some sort of cable that can clone samsung phones from one to another?

I am sure that at one time or another I had a Blackberry ID, but the problem is that I think it is linked to an old work email to which I no longer have access. Thus, I am looking for an analog way to get this done. Also, using my PC as a conduit makes me nervous. I think there is a Blackberry store in my town. I was tempted to just take the problem to them, but I was afraid they would only know about android stuff and also, if it is possible, I figured I should work on acquiring my second Passport before making the trek.

Am I on the right track here? Missing something obvious? Part of this is really hard because I don't speak chinese, so all I really know is that I must pay my phone bill every three months or so to keep my phone number active. (it is a pay as you go phone, not a long term contract.) If I had more language skills, I might be able to navigate a better solution with the phone company without having the phone physically there, but for now, I am assuming I will need the phone to be there, I regret I bringing it back to the US with me, and want to make a copy of it before I send it back to Asia. Can someone give me some guidance? I seem to be stuck solving this problem and the clock is ticking.

Thanks
Sukarita

[Dunt Dunt Dunt]

Forget the Passport aspect of this, just focus on what your really after - keeping your phone number.