Well, this is shaping up to be one of the biggest disasters in the history of cloud computing, and certainly the largest blow to Danger and the Sidekick platform: T-Mobile's now reporting that personal data stored on Sidekicks has "almost certainly has been lost as a result of a
server failure at Microsoft/Danger." They're still looking for a way to recover it, but they're not giving users a lot of hope -- meanwhile, servers are still on the fritz and customers are being advised not to let their devices power down because anything that's still on there will be lost the next time the device is turned on. Another communique is promised from T-Mobile on Monday to give everyone a status update on the recovery efforts, but at this point, it's not looking good at all.
Update: Apparently T-Mobile has paused the sale of new Sidekicks, as all models are now listed as "temporarily out of stock" on the company's site. Additionally, a warning as been added to the post on T-Mobile's forum which reads: "Sidekick customers, during this service disruption, please DO NOT remove your battery, reset your Sidekick, or allow it to lose power." Scary stuff, Sidekickers.
posted Oct 10th 2009 3:45PM
FAIL
This doesn't affect Microsoft My Phone...right?
Danger, Danger Microsoft servers. Nothing is present.
This is why, even with Gmail (which I use with Outlook), I make sure to keep everything synced and the .pst backed up on my own machine. Even though they've never had a major failure, I still won't rely 100% on a cloud.
3 words for T-Mobile!
What a joke!
FAILoud computing?
I'd be pissed.
Thank god I have a real carrier.
Ah, where are the cloud lovers now?
the title makes it look like it's -T-Mobile's fault,
quite brave of them to take the hit for Microsoft considering Microsoft will be a large player as Cload Computing grows
lol thank god i gave up on sk ages ago. winmo ftw.
It wouldn't surprise me if this has a connection to all those Danger employees that were fired during these 2 weeks from project pink, which also has crumbled to the ground in the same period.
Apple, did you jinx it??
@10minutehobo:
They've likely been lost. Their only chance is if they manage to stay powered on during the outage.
oh the joys of cloud computing
To sum things up, Cloud Computing = FAIL. Certainly not the utopia that it's been touted to be.
Oops.
I still like the idea of cloud computing. This is just one of the dangers for not having off-site data centers for backup. Salesforce just had a huge disaster recovery project for the entire company. 2 months ago, if SF was wiped off the map Salesforce would be out of business. However, now they have this amazing DR system. I surprised Microsoft went this long without setting something up but then again Salesforce went nearly 10 years without anything.
If tmobile thinks that they can buy me off with a 19.99 credit after losing every phone # contact i gathered for the last 3-5 years of my life they are sorely mistaken. Class actions here we come. Goodbye tmobile, goodbye sidekick. This is more than unacceptable. Other then this post i am absolutely speechless from rage.
Why doesn't the title of this post read, "T-Mobile : Danger probably lost all your Sidekick data"?
Cloud Computing!!! Of course it is a failure. Did anyone really think we could trust these greed ridden cooperate monsters who already proved they could bring the largest world economy to their knees practically overnight! This is not acceptable! This information should have been backed onto multiple servers in different location in case of catastrophic failure/corruption of an array, or entire machine. The only reason our data is gone is due to lack of investment into database infrastructure and personnel. Microsoft's profit was 17.7 billion in 2008! Microsoft made all of us upgrade our hardware to run vista! I think this company can afford some nice servers to back our data!
@JohnTitor: "the title makes it look like it's -T-Mobile's fault, quite brave of them to take the hit for Microsoft considering Microsoft will be a large player as Cload Computing grows"
It IS T-Mobile's fault. All computer services rely on either hardware or software from other companies (with the exception of Google and their home-grown servers but even then they didn't make the parts). It is the companies responsibility to make sure there are proper processes in place to ensure that data doesn't get lost and that users don't experience a down time. My company has outsourced our primary servers but we still get reports every day on backups and we pay to have a standby database and a disaster recovery system running. T-Mobile deserves to get crucified for this!
"Microsoft made all of us upgrade our hardware to run vista!"
No they didn't.
But I will agree with the failure that is the cloud. I'm not looking forward to the day when computer OSs are mostly cloud based. Not looking forward to it at all.
Hate to be cynical but this has turned out a very quick way for M$ to kill of sidekick/danger/M$ Pink .....
It was a disaster waiting to happen. It's like only keeping your files on your backup drive, and not your computer.
I wonder if some sort of compensation will be offered, and if so, what it will be.
T-Mobile already waived the data fee ($20) this month for Sidekick customers.
I'm in ur data centerz, munching ur dataz.
Not really. If T-Mobile was more responsible with its customer's data, it would have backed up the data and at separate locations. Isn't that one of the supposed benefits of cloud computing? They really messed this up.
@auntieNeo, i dont think Tmobile can backup the data of sidekick user because all data is hosted on Microsoft/Danger server. So it is not really tmobile responsibility to do the backup if it is not host on tmobile server. It is Microsoft/Danger fault for not doing the backup, T-Mobile is not here to be blamed. only Microsoft/Danger should be blamed for this
Right, it's like BIS/BES. Not TMobiles fault necessarily but definitely their responsibility.
Data is typically saved in multiple redundancy RAID configurations; this does not make any sense, except if they had a total failure of the server, as in a catastrophic virus or a fire. Either way, Microsoft looks pathetic for their lack of adequate infrastructure protections.
Presumably, the sidekick data was stored on a SAN on top of some sort of RAID configuration. if all the data has been lost, then that sounds like either a) someone hacked into the network and decided to fuck up all the sidekick owners, or b) there was some catastrophic event at the particular datacenter the servers were housed in.
Sure, you can say it's not T-Mo's fault because the Sidekick data is stored on MS/Danger servers, but T-Mo is the one using their services. I can't believe that MS would not have their data backed up at multiple data centers, as well as have redundancy in place at each data center. What is happening to Sidekick customers right now is absolutely ridiculous. Even the school I work for (which is small, only ~500 students) keeps backups on-site and OFF-site.
"It was a disaster waiting to happen"
That could be said about anything, like the World Trade Center in New York
Great News!! Sidekick owners are getting a $19.99 credit! Yay! All our problems have gone away with this ENORMOUS $19.99 credit!
This makes me happy I upgraded from my Sidekick LX to the Google myTouch. I have all of my contacts saved with Gmail and if I need to restore my phone I can just re-sync the contacts from my Gmail account, nothing to worry about....
Another reason why I don't like Microsoft all that much.
Another note, T-Mobile printed off a list of my contacts that I had to re-enter. All 145 of them. All because they couldn't cross synchronize my contacts from the Danger servers over to the Google servers...I'm glad I switched phones last month before all of this happened.
Oh dear!
I, for one, am looking forward to a lot of "MICROSOFT LOST MY CONTACTS!!!!" facebook groups...
Lawsuits brewing...
Lawsuits??? There will be someting in the EULA that gets them off the hook should you lose data on the device, i always make backups of my data, even things like contacts in googlemail so that if something goes south i still have it.
@Mike: no, silly! not users suing TMobile/Danger/Microsoft, TMobile suing Danger/Microsoft!
So thats why they're called Danger
Well played.
The above comment has been:
Ziegler. Approved.
That's why they were called Danger? Cause if you relate this to what was Danger (as opposed to what is Microsoft) then you would start feeling the same way about Android, which was the next company made by the Danger team.
I'd say that about wraps it up for Microsoft in the mobile/smartphone market.
The Pink/WinMo 6.5 disaster of 2009 where MS didn't just screw over it's OEM partners like normal but included the customer for good measure.
Where are the legions of WIntards that leap all over Apple wasn't perfect articles like the vomit scene from the exorcist? In a huddle trying to work out a plausible defense for the mothership hmmm.... awfully quiet
yeah well i have a PRE .. whats the difference?
you mean you cant see ANY difference between the two devices?.. none?
The premise of your logic is flawed. I wouldn't go so far as to say you "fail at life" because of your broken logic, but if you keep it up, you may very well do it.
Why of why do you fail so much T-Mobile?
Pfft. I'm glad they blocked iPhones, I wouldn't have stayed on their network past the first free 10 days anyway.
Uhh, news to me, my iphone 2g on Tmobile still works just fine, but thanks!
Maybe he meant they blocked iPhones from using the cheap Sidekick data plan. I read that somewhere else.