Sidekick Disaster Shows Data's Not Safe in the 'Cloud'

Oct. 16, 2009 -- 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 Oct. 1, literally every user of the Sidekick data service lost the private personal records – e-mails, notes, calendar entries, contacts, etc. -- they had stored on the system.

Initially, it was believed that information was lost forever. The official statement from Microsoft/Danger (the latter being the company that builds the Sidekick) and T-Mobile was that the data "almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger." Then, yesterday, Microsoft announced that it had managed to recover "most" of the lost data and blamed a "system failure in the core database and backup."

Needless to say, the lawsuits have already begun: The Sidekick's 1 million users had a deep emotional (and often financial) investment in the device … and that loyalty had been betrayed.

T-Mobile tried to assuage all of those hurt feelings by offering users, by way of apology, a $100 gift card and one month's free data service. As you can imagine, that only made many users even more angry. A hundred bucks? For the hours it will take to reconstruct a lost contact list and full appointment book? A month's free service? For that last photo of grandma in the hospital – now lost forever?

My friend Scott Budman, the veteran tech reporter for KNTV-TV in San Jose, Calif., and the "TechNow" television series, has just written an interesting analysis of the Sidekick debacle. In it he suggests that, ultimately, this is a case of misplaced trust in the reliability of far-off servers operating in that imprecise, ineffable reality of "The Cloud."