Take this with a grain of salt, because we haven’t been able to confirm it with Microsoft, but we’ve heard from a source that employees inside Microsoft who are working on the Danger/Sidekick meltdown are optimistic that they’ll be able to recover all of the data that was lost during last weekend’s catastrophic server failure. That’s a big change from what we were hearing a few days ago, when T-Mobile said that the data was “almost certainly” gone for good.
Since then, T-Mobile’s tone has changed: there have been reports of some users turning their Sidekicks on to find that their data had been restored, and earlier this week T-Mobile issued a new statement that said “Recent efforts indicate the prospects of recovering some lost content may now be possible.”
Even if Microsoft’s engineers do mange to recover all of the lost data, all parties involved will still take a huge hit in consumer trust, negative press, and questions about the integrity of “the cloud”. But it would certainly soften the blows, and could also help Microsoft and T-Mobile fend off the pending lawsuits from users who lost data.
Despite the average intelligence of sidekick users, restoring data is probably more important to their users than a little of bad press.
What boggles my mind is how quick they “announced” that data recovery would be impossible. You usually wouldn’t know that 100% without a bit of research, diagnostics, and even clean-room work (in extreme cases).
“”all parties involved will still take a huge hit in consumer trust,”
i disagree, the fact that they have the ability to restore something after backups were deleted is amazing. i have MORE trust in them now
That makes perfect sense, if somebody first loses something and then can get it back they must be better. You’re a genius.
what about apple’s snow leopard bug that wipes your hard drive clean. ”
will “parties involved will still take a huge hit in consumer trust”? but its apple, so techcrunch cant make an article about it
I agree with you. I’m a MAC owner & when something goes wrong nobody seems to do or say anything to Apple at all. You know things like these are making Apple very complacent.
That’s an odd thing to say given the Apple bashing that has gone on here re Google Voice, App Store rejections, etc.
If ever there was some data that could be recovered, this will be the test. Microsoft have potentially billions of dollars of future revenue (and possibly the future of the company itself) on the line here so you can bet they have a veritable army of data recovery experts on the case.
That said, it’s been almost 48 hours since this “revelation” (made by way of tip-offs to two fairly random bloggers) and an absence of follow up beyond “the prospects of recovering some lost content may now be possible” suggests to me that it’s PR spin more than reality.
After all, if you were being savaged by the press you’d be tempted to throw them a bone, right?
Sam
its been confirmed, look on other tech sites like engadget that got the scoop first. microsoft recovered all data
I know this will sound conspiratorial, but Microsoft would love to give the world a large pause when considering cloud computing. I’m not sure how much they actually minded all of this.
And I’m not surprised at all that a few days after the press, they “were able to save it all”.
That makes perfect sense, if somebody first loses something and then can get it back they must be better. You’re a genius.
As long as ‘you people’ keep calling it ‘the cloud’ no regular folks are going to trust their files to it. It should be called ’secure, encrypted, online servers’ or something like that, or simply ‘the vault’ e.g.
Microsoft/Danger are not lying but aren’t telling the truth in their recovery efforts. While it is true they are able to restore contacts and other data it is from a backup dataset that is approximately a year old. I know this because my account was one of the ones affected and I did the data restore yesterday. Information provided from a Sidekick support specialist confirmed that this is the case.
From the information provided they had to go back to a former Danger employee to recover the password to a backup of the dataset from about a year ago. It was obvious that it came from an old dataset because contacts that had been deleted from my account were in the restored contact file provided by Microsoft/Danger and newer contacts added in the past months were absent from the “restored” data. Same situation with the photo albums, many that had been deleted were all of a sudden back and newer ones were absent.
So Microsoft/Danger did restore user data but they apparently did not recover any data from the server crash. So my take is that they haven’t been doing backups on the customer databases for about a year which I find to be totally incompetent database management (I have worked in the computer industry on and off for 20 years). As a side note I have been a sidekick user since 2002 (started with a sidekick II and currently have a sidekick 2008) and T-Mobile/Danger/Microsoft have never provided an easy way to backup the various data on the phone like other provider/devices do. Microsoft/Danger are complicit in that part of the equation.
I would love to know the root cause of the server crash.
..Jim