I don't have a Sidekick...but this is completely unacceptable. For whatever reason, people trust companies with their data, and this situation does quite a bit to undermine that.

There is no excuse for that. I'm sure lost of people lost their jobs because of this.

So what happens now? Are all sidekick phones dead, or is it just a clean slate?

Yet another reason why cloud computing is over-rated.

So do we need any other reason to NOT trust Clod Computing. I mean "Cloud" Computing?

I guess it must suck for those people who put their faith in Cloud Computing and Microsoft.

HAHA wow.That sucks for them I guess.Not making a backup is the biggest mistake they could of made.

My brother was a victim of the BS. They gave him a free month of service. What a load of crap. Hitachi arrays are garbage. Should have stuck with EMC arrays.

Wow! Putting all your cookies in one jar. One server for all my data. Are they using MS Home Server version 1.0? You should know better! Didn't you read the sign? "Danger!"

Oh come on now. That's got to be a few dozen terabytes of data, and they WERE running a RAID 5, so what danger was there to begin with?

Hah, did you catch that little pun there, danger, and the company's name is Danger! Hahaha.... wait, WTF!?!?! Why would you name your company Danger? After this fiasco, sounds like someone is already making plans to change that little ditty.

I smell lawsuits coming.
They are so careless.

Sue the ka rap out dem executive terrorizers!!

Wouldn't it be nice if "the invisible hand" worked the way it was supposed to and all of these customers' "demand" for Sidekick service suddenly evaporated along with their data--sending the telecommunications division of MS into an unrecoverable tailspin?

This likely won't happen will it?

Where the hell is Adam Smith??

The same story elsewhere states: "Microsoft has demonstrated that the dark side of cloud computing has no silver linings."

Makes you wonder just how much of a role MS is playing in this or if they did anything to insure that this type of failure never happens. If cloud computing does not when favor with the consumer, then we are back to using the same old office apps...the very apps the MS dominates the market share.

who the f*** doesn't back up large amounts of user data?

my girlfriend has a sidekick slide. it froze this Sunday and well.. poof all the data gone.

Did the hard drive get smashed into smithereens by terrorists?

If true and data wasnt backed up before upgrade then nothing "went wrong" during the upgrade.

What went "wrong" was Danger's idiot IT admins who didnt plan a backup before Hitachi showed up. Even if contracted to have Hitachi back it up you are still taking too big a risk and being naive about it.

LOL that's funny! Knew the whole "cloud" idea for a phone was a stupid concept. At least when I lose my phone it's my fault if I didn't have the phone data backed up. But then again the people who expect a company to do everything for you like a backup and don't take simple precautions like backing up your own phone data are dumb to begin with. Do I feel sorry for them not one bit.

Correction, "class action lawsuit". Could be a big one. Some lawyer out there is already drafting the suit documents...

They won't make that mistake again.

...and that's how cloud computing died.

Storing user data over cloud and not having redundancy or backup is just lame. Agree that there should be class action lawsuit and good job for microsoft making cloud computing really "nice" promotion.

The Sidekick never was a very smart phone. I'm not sure why so many people flocked to a phone like the Sidekick that was made by some small no name company (Danger) when there were better alternatives like Palm and Windows Mobile. The Sidekick in its various incarnations has always been one of the most problematic phones that T-Mobile has ever sold. The Sidekick is as much of a smart phone as the Nuviphone from Garmin. Suckers.

Time to update the "no warranty expressed or implied" section of the EULA again.

Murphy's law: If something can go wrong it will
I wonder who are the masterminds of this architecture. I mean ... a contact data will not be bigger than 1k, and most of us don't have 1000 contacts, so a few megs would have been enough to secure the most important data like contacts, calendar etc. Most of modern phones have gigabytes of memory. Why not store critical things on the device too? The design team = LOOSERS + STUPIDS. Probably together with the upper management that cut the costs and discarded a safer but more expansive design.
We will never loose customer data ... yeah, right. YOU JUST DID!

Right. They will make a different one.

Heads will fly!!
For a company now days to not backup their data is inexcusable.
Even I have my data backed up at 2 other places. A secondary HDD and at remote server.
Also, forget about the backup before the update. What happened to last week's backup, or EVEN LAST MONTH's? None of those were made?

I know backing up TBs of data is expensive. But they are in a worst position now.

No. Probably they rebuilt the RAID volumes. Tadaaaaa!!

1TB HDD is 100$. And it's reusable. I know it's not that simple. But I cannot imagine that a solution to backup up data at a reasonable level of security and reliability will cost more than let's say 1000$/TB/Month

Oh. Another very important thing: CHECK THE BACKUP!!!!
A long long time ago a customer made daily backups only to discover that for some reason they were corrupted and unusable. Thank god the one week old full backup was good and we only had to type in a week of work. Because at that time (8 years ago) they still had a lot of paper.

I never knew the Sidekick was a MS thing. I had one efor a year before I upgraded to a MDA after 3 years of that I downgraded to a L2.

Normally I don't like to curse but...how do you not make absolutely fucking sure the data is backed up before doing ANYTHING to the servers? I work for a mid-sized company with field personal and we do use cloud but we also have offsite protected backup. If I didn't back up every damn bit of data on the servers at our HQ before doing anything to them and it was all lost? I wouldn't just be fired I'd be sued and rightly so. Yes people make mistakes but this should've never ever happened.

Danger had no offsite backup for anything?? That's borderline criminal incompetance. How can you not backup such crital data to an outside datafarm or something once a week?

I can see the lawyers for T-Mobile and Danger going over their TOS's right now seeing if they can be sued. Danger's entire IT Dept needs to be fired.