Microsoft Releases Sidekick Data Recovery Tool

News
By Jane McEntegart
published

Microsoft has released a recovery tool for Sidekick users who are still without their data following last week's outage.

Microsoft today issued another statement regarding the company's progress in recovering everyone's data. A post from the Redmond-based company yesterday confirmed that the company would have contacts restored by the end of the week, with all remaining content following shortly afterward. Making good on the first half of that promise, Microsoft today posted a recovery tool that allows users to restore their contacts via the My T-Mobile website.

Of course, it's not just folks' contacts that were lost but, rest assured, Microsoft and Danger are working hard to complete the next phase of the great data restoration.

"We continue to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to restore your data. We’re making solid progress on the next phase in this restoration process, including your photographs, notes, to-do lists, marketplace data and high scores."

Nice to see things are finally motoring along at a steady pace, isn't it?

Check out the full post here.

Jane McEntegart
6 Comments Comment from the forums
  • superblahman123
    Good to see that they're not just saying "Whoops" and walking away.

    They must be going through countless methods of tracking down where any user data sits at any time and looking to see if it is recoverable. Because the data must travel through multiple portals to reach the phone, there must be a portal somewhere that stores some amount of user data that they could recover from.

    Good for them.

    Reply
  • hellwig
    It's good Microsoft is getting the data back, but its been what now, 3 weeks? Short of physical damage to the system (i.e. the hosting site burning to the ground), it should have been a matter of minutes to bring the hot-spare up and running. Of course, it doesn't sound like they had a hot spare. Not sure how this is Cloud Computing. Cloud computing means using the multiple computers in the cloud, not just a single computer that happens to be hosted offsite, thats NOT cloud computing.
    Reply
  • Manos
    hellwigIt's good Microsoft is getting the data back, but its been what now, 3 weeks? Short of physical damage to the system (i.e. the hosting site burning to the ground), it should have been a matter of minutes to bring the hot-spare up and running. Of course, it doesn't sound like they had a hot spare. Not sure how this is Cloud Computing. Cloud computing means using the multiple computers in the cloud, not just a single computer that happens to be hosted offsite, thats NOT cloud computing.
    If you had read the original article about what has happened and officially stated you would know that any kind of backups were also removed with the incident. Everything got formated which means that even the backups couldnt easily be restored and why they also suspect it to be purposly done and not an accident.

    But yeah, MS seems to be doing all they can for the ones that screwed up on the whole system. Im sure they freaked out. :S
    Reply
  • endif
    manosIf you had read the original article about what has happened and officially stated you would know that any kind of backups were also removed with the incident. Everything got formated which means that even the backups couldnt easily be restored and why they also suspect it to be purposly done and not an accident.But yeah, MS seems to be doing all they can for the ones that screwed up on the whole system. Im sure they freaked out. :S
    Actually hellwig makes a valid point that I have been talking about since the original article. I work with SAN's on a daily basis (Equallogic). If they were doing a true cloud computing environment then the data shouldn't have been in one single location. All of that data should not have been housed on the one SAN. If it were true cloud computing they would have sites set up across the country with the SAN's replicating the data (which they do extremely well). This provides them a faster connection so that they are always connecting to the datacenter nearest their location.

    In situations with true cloud computing since the data would have been replicated to many different sites, a corrupt firmware update would have only effected the one datacenter. They would have been able to fail over to another site within the cloud (which is the whole concept behind cloud computing from an IT standpoint). They would have restored the data at that site from the other sites. Its their own fault for not performing a proper implementation.
    Reply
  • ossie
    Now microsuxx poses as the saviour...
    All the b$ they're pu$hing, is at least highly dubious. At first the data was completely lost, all backups fried, etc., from an simple FW update/system failure(?). Do they really believe somebody knowledgeable would buy into that story?
    Either they are completely incompetent (even for m$ a remarkable achievement, while they're usually not very far), or it seems to be (more and more) just a publicity stunt.
    Reply
  • ThisIsMe
    hellwigIt's good Microsoft is getting the data back, but its been what now, 3 weeks?
    I'm thinking it's closer to 2 weeks.

    hellwigNot sure how this is Cloud Computing. Cloud computing means using the multiple computers in the cloud, not just a single computer that happens to be hosted offsite, thats NOT cloud computing.endifActually hellwig makes a valid point that I have been talking about since the original article. I work with SAN's on a daily basis (Equallogic). If they were doing a true cloud computing environment then the data shouldn't have been in one single location. All of that data should not have been housed on the one SAN. If it were true cloud computing they would have sites set up across the country with the SAN's replicating the data (which they do extremely well). This provides them a faster connection so that they are always connecting to the datacenter nearest their location. In situations with true cloud computing since the data would have been replicated to many different sites, a corrupt firmware update would have only effected the one datacenter. They would have been able to fail over to another site within the cloud (which is the whole concept behind cloud computing from an IT standpoint). They would have restored the data at that site from the other sites. Its their own fault for not performing a proper implementation.

    CLOUD COMPUTING:

    a) the use of a 3rd party service to perform computing needs over a publicly accessable network
    b) a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet
    c) the use of Web Services
    d) Internet-based development/use of computer technology

    Not one of these definitions mention the requirement of having multiple data stores. In some cases the practice of having more than one location for storage may help or hinder the service, but it is not necessary for a cloud to be a cloud.
    Reply