I wrote a piece titled “Hey Microsoft…. backup much?” over on DailyMe.com about the data loss experienced by T-Mobile Sidekick customers this weekend as a result of a “server failure” by Danger, the Microsoft-owned subsidiary that makes the Sidekick.
Danger/Microsoft’s failure to have a backup (or multiple backups) of their customer’s data is absolutely mind-blowing and is certainly a wakeup call to the ever-increasing number of businesses whose products/services rely on such data.
Techcrunch’s Nik Cubrilovic wrote a (lengthy) opinion about the incident in which he argues that Sidekick customers who lost their data may only have themselves to blame since:
if you didn’t care enough to take care of it yourself, then you didn’t really need it.
Cubrilovic’s advice for those Sidekick customers who find themselves without their contacts, photos, calendars and to-do lists:
The solution may be to do nothing, certainly not to panic. The biggest problem is that we hoard data. We produce more data and information than we ever have, and we are all vain enough to believe that the data we create is so fantastic that it should live on for eternity. Losing the contact list on your phone shouldn’t be a problem – you should know who your friends are anyway. If you are losing sleep because you can’t find an old email you wrote, you likely have deeper issues to address.
However, as Dave Winer and others point out in the comments, in the case of Sidekick customers this kind of misses the point.
Companies who charge customers to have their data stored and available via ‘the cloud’, as was the case with Sidekick customers, have an obligation to protect that data regardless of its ‘value’. And, given all the PR that Danger/Microsoft and T-Mobile have received over the last few days, it is pretty clear there is a strong business incentive for companies who are trusted with such data to make sure they don’t lose it.
Social Homes