Sidekick Users Lose Personal Data
I’m not a user of the Sidekick, but apparently, it uses remote storage to host photos, contacts and calendar entries. And the server that hosts all of those files has suffered a catastrophic failure and it seems that the data is lost forever. So if a Sidekick uses this server for file storage, that data is now gone.
From Yahoo here:
Users of Microsoft Corp’s Sidekick mobile phone may have permanently lost data such as contacts, photos and calendar entries due to the failure of a Microsoft server computer.
T-Mobile USA said in a notice available on its website on Monday that its customers who do have such data stored locally on their Sidekick devices will “almost certainly” have lost the data.
It also advised customers against resetting a Sidekick by removing the battery or letting the battery drain as this would still result in the loss of any personal content stored on the device.
When operating normally, the Sidekick retrieves data from Microsoft servers after an event such as a phone reset.
“Personal information stored on your device such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger,” a Microsoft unit, the company said.
Microsoft said in an emailed statement that the recovery process has been “incredibly complex” because it suffered a confluence of errors from a server failure that hurt its main and backup databases supporting Sidekick users.
The glitch comes as technology companies are increasingly looking to convince customers to use remote storage services to back up their data.
Ah, the old “confluence of errors” excuse. I will have to add that one to my BOFH list of excuses in the right-hand sidebar. What they basically mean is that they never really practiced their disaster recovery procedure, and when they went to implement it, it didn’t work. And to top it off, there was obviously no redundancy built in.
The article tries to use this problem to cast aspersions at the whole cloud computing technology, but I think the Microsoft/Danger/t-mobile snafu is not really a cloud technology, if it failed as described. Cloud technology by definition is more robust, more available, and more immune to a single failure of online storage. I’m just glad iPhones use local storage on the phone synched with the home PC. Was anyone impacted by this?
