[AccessD] Back Up Your Backup

Rocky Smolin rockysmolin at bchacc.com
Tue Oct 13 10:52:05 CDT 2009


Sidekick users distraught as personal data vanishes
http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/oct/13/sidekick-users-distraught-personal-data-vanishes/?uniontrib


By Peter Svensson

ASSOCIATED PRESS

2:00 a.m. October 13, 2009

NEW YORK — Owners of Sidekick phones may have lost all the personal information they put on the device, including contact numbers, because of a failure of servers that remotely stored the data.

The incident is a huge blow to the reputation of the Sidekick and is a reminder of the dangers of trusting a single provider to safeguard information.

The phones are made by a Microsoft subsidiary and sold by T-Mobile USA, which said many Sidekick owners' information is “almost certainly” gone. T-Mobile is offering customers $20 to refund the cost of one month of data usage on the phone.

Microsoft spokeswoman Debbie Anderson said yesterday that there was a still a chance some of the lost user data could be restored from a backup system. Engineers were working on it in the Microsoft data center where the failure occurred, she said.

The phones were troubled by a data outage a week ago. Service was intermittent last week, and then users started reporting that their Sidekicks were wiped of all personal information.

“This has been a terrible experience,” said Mary Boyle of Silver Spring, Md. She lost more than 500 contacts, 100 pictures, a to-do list and dozens of Web site passwords.

On Saturday, T-Mobile and Microsoft warned customers not to restart their phones, remove the batteries or let the phones run down their batteries. Boyle said she did none of those things, yet her data disappeared anyway.

Although the underlying data services were working again yesterday, T-Mobile was still advising customers not to reset their phones. T-Mobile also was listing all Sidekicks as “out of stock” on its Web site.

It's not clear how many customers have been affected or how many Sidekicks are in operation, though the figure could approach 1 million. The phone is popular among young urban customers. Users have appreciated its large QWERTY keyboard for text messaging, a feature now copied by mainstream phones.

Microsoft bought Danger Inc., the maker of the Sidekick, last year in an attempt to revitalize its smart-phone software portfolio.

The Sidekick's remote data storage feature was ahead of its time and served as a selling point for the device. It meant that if someone lost a phone, the contents could easily be downloaded to a new one. But the Sidekick didn't complement the remote storage with a convenient way to save data locally. Most newer phones, such as Apple's iPhone, are designed to back up a user's data when the device is connected to a PC.

Increasingly, consumers and businesses are relying on “cloud” services — in which e-mail, word processing and other applications store their data in remote server farms. Providers such as Google back up the data, but as the Sidekick incident demonstrates, having a local backup can be essential. 






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