Posted on 10/17/2009 10:52:52 PM PDT by grey_whiskers
If you own a T-Mobile/Microsoft Sidekick smartphone I don’t have to tell you this. But if you are among the millions who don’t: on October 1st literally every user of the Sidekick data service lost the private personal records – emails, notes, calendar entries, contacts, etc. — they had stored on the system.
Initially, it was believed that information was now lost forever. The official statement from Microsoft/Danger (the latter being the company that builds the Sidekick) and T-Mobile is that the data “almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger.”
(Excerpt) Read more at pajamasmedia.com ...
Cheers!
Yeah right; "pay us $5 a month and never worry about your data."
One born every minute!
DVD-Rs and a little discipline and all your critical files are safe.
Big deal.
I don’t trust online backup services for a number of reasons.
From security to actual availability.
If you have data that you value, you must make backups - in truth you need backups of backups.
The Sidekick service had nothing to do with cloud computing. It was a hosted service with a classical client/server design that had a single point of failure.
Cloud technology, like RAID technology and the Internet itself, distributes data and processing across multiple nodes. One or more nodes can go down, even the whole mesh can go down, but the data is safe... or at least, much safer than it is in a Sidekick-style architecture.
I sense that Microsoft is trying to make some lemonade from this lemon of a mess they’ve made. Their business model, after all, is under assault from cloud-based services like Google Documents. If they’re going to crater a half-billion-dollar acquisition as they have with Danger/Sidekick, they’d at least want to take a few swipes at their nemesis as they go down. It’s unseemly, but it sure looks like that’s what’s going on. Because the Danger/Sidekick mess had nothing to do with cloud computing, and reports of this sort have everything to do with agenda.
Gmail: Pay us $0 a month and never worry about your data, except for occasional access outages.
DVD-Rs and a little discipline and all your critical files are safe. Big deal.
True. Just remember to do it and don't lose them.
Also:
See http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/10/09/exclusive-pink-danger-leaks-from-microsofts-windows-phone/
Entertainingly written, informative and devastating. Yum.
as far as conspiracy theories go, this one is worth very little. it sounds good until you realize that the idea is to rid the r&d branch of the obligation to maintain the system by purposefully wrecking the system. they could have just sold off the intellectual property and kept the programmers.
SAN upgrades got nuttin’ to do wid it. Microsoft, Hitachi, Apple, whatever, got nuttin’ to do wid it. Here at some point we had system administrators who did not ensure that they had adequate backup, whatever the medium. No excuses. In our profession there are few cardinal sins but that’s one of them. No FUD, please, no conspiracy, no clouding of the waters. Somebody had intimate relations with the pooch and that’s the end of it. IMHO, of course.
It’s amazing how future Microsoft products beat current Apple products time and time again, isn’t it? You’d think Apple would have just given up by now.
“Don’t get an iPhone! Wait! We’ve got something that will blow the iPhone away!” [fumble, fumble, sound of a chainsaw, sound of a cat howling, sound of a hammer, sound of three years passing] “Wouldn’t you rather have… this?!”
And what they reveal is a goat.
Not a figurative goat, a real goat. With a rotary-dial phone duct taped to it.
The goat is bleating plaintively.
Cheers!
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