This is great news for sidekick users. But it makes me all the more eager to see a post-mortem - who decided it was a good idea to announce total data loss so soon? In every other case I can remember, the responsible parties made lots of noise about taking every possible step to recover data before finally admitting failure.<p>The celerity of the Sidekick announcement made it sound like their entire datacenter had fallen into a crater of hot lava during a SAN upgrade - no chance of recovery even by poring over the drive platters in some clean room.<p>On the plus side, I bet it's a great time to buy a Sidekick. That data center is going to be staffed by sysadmins fed on champagne and foie gras, with octuple off-site backups.
First of all -- did I see a post on here saying that the people "launching <i>rumors</i> against MS" need to take responsibility? That seems odd.<p>This press release is a masterpiece. Here's the bit that sounds the best:<p><pre><code> We now believe that data loss affected a minority of Sidekick users
</code></pre>
Possible Translation Given That Wording: 51% or more of our customers have kept their Sidekicks charged, so the data is still on their phone and they are not "affected" by data loss.<p><pre><code> We plan to begin restoring users’ personal data as
soon as possible, starting with personal contacts,
after we have validated the data and our restoration plan.
</code></pre>
They haven't even begun restoring data. "Recovering" it from a hard drive in a <i>broken</i> cloud infrastructure is the same as recovering it from a broken physical hard drive -- if you ever find yourself doing that for your customers, and explaining that the situation is under control, you screwed up in ways that are difficult to fully expletize.<p>But then to brand this press release as<p><pre><code> MICROSOFT CONFIRMS DATA RECOVERY FOR SIDEKICK USERS
</code></pre>
Whoa.<p>I suppose it's a necessary level of ass-hattery; the situation is entirely negative. Your mobile cloud infrastructure just lost peoples' data, and did it so spectacularly that your corporate partner fed you to the sharks; it's probably worse than a Blue Screen of Death during a product launch.<p>So that title is technically true. In that they are <i>planning</i> on trying to recover the data ("after we validate the data <i>and</i> <i>our</i> <i>plan</i>").<p>Beautiful, PR people.<p><i>slow</i> <i>clap</i>.
What I would like is to see some responsibility of the people that have been launching all the rumors against MS. The first two articles I read about this mentioned that MS had no backups at all, which apparently are just out right lies and caused much of the MS backlash (as usual) based on nothing more than rumors.<p>I know this is the internet, and I'm happy for the Sidekick users that got their data back, but I'm starting to get fed up with most tech news websites that pride themselves to be the first to deliver the news that don't actually exist.
If you look at the wording of the original press release - it never mentions backups. It talks about "in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information. However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely."<p>In this latest press release, however, it seems like the backup process <i>itself</i> was flawed. The backup database became corrupted.<p>"Outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the <i>back-up</i>."<p>"Microsoft said it had taken steps to strengthen the stability of the Sidekick service and started a more resilient backup process."<p>"more resilient backup process to ensure that the integrity of our database backups is maintained."<p>So perhaps the rabid bloggers (even though they may have overshot themselves declaring no backups) were on the right trail. But a flawed backup system is the same as no backups, right?<p><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107204574475032328975504.html" rel="nofollow">http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870410720457447...</a>
Seriously, the idea of having the data on the cloud is very appealing, but only as long as the infrastructure is properly managed.<p>That's probably the only reason for tolerating MS Exchange. The phone integration - calendar, contacts and mail - are excellent - and you manage the server the way you see fit.<p>On the other hand, you get an Exchange server to manage.
In that case they totally let this story get away from them. All I've heard (and not on tech media outlets either, but on NPR and the like) is that the data was gone forever. They should not have allowed that story to run uncorrected while there was still a chance it could come back.