Sidekick users have found themselves in quite a situation to say the least.
The Sidekick is a special kind of phone. Instead of storing information, such as contacts, calendar data, photos, and other key data on the phone itself, it stores the data on remote servers. When the Sidekick is turned on, the data is downloaded from the servers and any changes are synchronized to the remote servers.
This is not unlike how some of the applications on the T-Mobile G1, the Android platform, or the iPhone. In fact, "the cloud" or hosted applications are becoming more and more popular due to their accessibility, usually using a browser, and the shifting of the responsibility of the data from the user to the providing the service.
There have been some memorable, recent outages of hosted services, such as GMail, and some users of free services have reported data loss. But nothing to this scale.
Danger, the company the manufactures the T-Mobile Sidekick was purchased by Microsoft for 500 million dollars on February 11 2008. Many thought this news was strange because Danger would be in direct competition with the Windows Mobile group, which announced the release of WM 6.5 on October 6th, with much disappointment.
Sidekick users have experienced a major outage related to the storage on "the cloud," leaving them unable to access data such as their contacts and calendar for the last week or so. This, needless to say, has frustrated the paying customers of T-Mobile, and by extension Danger and Microsoft.
But the bad has just gone to worse. Microsoft, through T-Mobile, has just announced that any data that has not been recovered so far is probably lost.
Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger's latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that 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. That said, our teams continue to work around-the-clock in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information. However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely low. As such, we wanted to share this news with you and offer some tips and suggestions to help you rebuild your personal content. You can find these tips in our Sidekick Contacts FAQ. We encourage you to visit the Forums on a regular basis to access the latest updates as well as FAQs regarding this service disruption.
A server failure? I applaud T-Mobile's honesty. However, anyone who works in Enterprise-level IT knows that this is absolutely inexcusable. Backing data up, testing backups, redundancy, server farms, replication across data centers; These concepts are not new.
It will be very interesting to see the official explanation, if any, from Microsoft.
