Photo by m.prinke.
Perhaps you’ve been out of touch with civilization this past weekend and missed the major failure that occurred over at Danger/Microsoft. To get you up to speed: the server(s) failed and no backups were available (i.e. the sysadmins over at Danger will probably be unemployed for life).
If you happen to have a Sidekick, make sure you do not run out of battery and do not turn it off. If you do, you will lose all your data. Instead, try to get your data out of there as soon as possible. Information on how to make a complete backup of you Sidekick are scarse. The closes thing I found was this thread on the T-mobile forum. It suggests that you should send all your contacts (one-by-one) via e-mail or Bluetooth. This is a very painful process, and I’m glad I’m not a Sidekick user. Granted, the Sidekick is hardly a prosumer phone, and perhaps we should not expect it to be on par with the iPhone or an Android-device.
So what can we learn from this incident? My take is that even if your data lives in the cloud, you still need backups. The other lesson to learn from this is to not use a Sidekick.
Additional material and the press release are available here.
[...] reported the other day that Microsoft (or rather the subsidiary Danger) managed to lose all data for T-Mobile’s [...]
[...] way I think of it, IMAP offers a free backup of all your emails. As many Sidekick users recently learned the hard way, you should not rely on just one instance of your data (even if it’s in the cloud). IMAP [...]