Microsoft 'restores' Sidekick contacts, sort of

Microsoft has told Sidekick customers who lost their data following an extremely humiliating server breakdown that some contacts have now been restored. However, the software vendor hasn't recovered photos, notes, to-do lists, high scores or other data for Sidekick users yet. Microsoft said it was working "around the clock" …

[Bilgepipe]

How?

So what did they do? Call everyone in the US and ask if they knew any T-Mobile/Sidekick users? Now all they have to do is run around taking photographs of them and asking them when their birthdays are and all data will be magically restored.

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a SAN upgrade failure... and management incompetence regarding the backups

Kelly Fiveash writes, "Microsoft has told Sidekick customers who lost their data following an extremely humiliating server breakdown that some contacts have now been restored."

(It was not a sever breakdown. The servers were fine. The issue was the SAN upgrade failure and a poor management decision regarding backups to trim scheduled outage time.)

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/10/15/microsofts-pinkdanger-backup-problem-blamed-on-roz-ho/

According to the source, the real problem was that a Microsoft manager directed the technicians performing scheduled maintenance to work without a safety net in order to save time and money. The insider reported:

“In preparation for this [SAN] upgrade, they were performing a backup, but it was 2 days into a 6 day backup procedure (it’s a lot of data). Someone from Microsoft (Roz Ho) told them to stop the backup procedure and proceed with the upgrade after assurances from Hitachi that a backup wasn’t necessary. This was done against the objections of Danger engineers.

”Now, they had a backup from a couple of months ago, but they only had the SAN space for a single backup. Because they started a new backup, they had to remove the old one. If they hadn’t done a backup at all, they’d still have the previous backup to fall back on.

“Anyway, after the SAN upgrade, disks started ‘disappearing.’ Logically, Oracle [software] freaked out and started trying to recover, which just made the damage worse.”

The problem with this report is that is places the blame, not on a complex Oracle deployment, not on bad SAN hardware or a firmware glitch, not a disgruntled employee with inappropriate levels of access to a mission critical service, but squarely upon Microsoft management.

[IT specialist]

Microsoft is sneaky

Microsoft is behaving in a very sneaky way.

It doesn't want you to know how many users of its mobile phone platform had their data wiped out. Some reports quote Ballmer as saying "It is not clear there was data loss."

Microsoft is trying to make out there was no data loss, but as this Reg story says, customers' photos, notes, to-do lists have not been restored. So where is that data?

By not coming clean about the extent of the data loss and why it happened, Microsoft is painting itself to be a very untrustworthy company, especially in the mobile phone and "cloud" business.

[Anonymous Coward]

Damage - Done

Business Model - Gone

[Get the puck outa here]

Let the class action suits begin!

Attention Sidekick users!

The NSA is still sorting through the database.

Meanwhile, here's $100 for your trouble.

[Anonymous Coward]

This mess is 100% attributable to T-Mobile...

One Big Obvious Question: Why the hell wasn't this data stored on the Sidekick in the first place, with the "danger cloud" as backup only? Flash memory is cheap and plentiful, right?

Obvious Answer: Because keeping customer data locked up in T-Mobile's proprietary "cloud", and far away from customer-control makes it very difficult for Sidekick users to change providers.

This whole fiasco is 100% attributable to T-Mobile marketing. I hope the class action Lawsuit brings T-Mobile to it's knees. Sprint does the same thing.

Thanks, but I'll stay with providers who give me a SIM card that I can move frm phone-to-phone, and leave the danger of the "cloud" to more gullible consumers.