Unbelievable

[rowyn]

Latest on the Sidekick, direct from T-Mobile.

Allow me to quote the most relevant bit:

Based on Microsoft/Danger's latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device - such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos - that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger.

...

I am still trying to wrap my head around this.

I understand how a company can fail to have a recent backup. That happens a lot. You do a nightly backup or something and you lose the last 12 hours of data since the last save. Or you do a nightly backup and when you try to restore, you discover the backup is corrupted and you go to an older one. OpenDiary had a hacker attack some years ago to which they lost not only the live environment but three or four months' worth of backups. But they did, eventually, go back far enough to find a backup that worked. They were able to restore. Three months out of date, yes, and that was catastrophic. But they had something.

Microsoft/Danger's got nothing?

Seriously? Nothing?

I can't even believe it. Literally, I am struggling to believe that they mean what they wrote. makovette linked me to a third party site that reproduced the letter, and I had to go to T-Mobile's page myself to verify that was really what they were saying. Because I can't believe it.

O_O

Five or so months ago, I switched my primary email to GMail. My main reason: I figured Google was probably better at backing up my data than I was.

This makes me rethink the wisdom of cloud computing. Yes, Danger was a small company and they'd lost most of their talent since the acquisition. But they were owned and managed by Microsoft. Microsoft, people! However much people may mock them, this is not a company widely known for gross negligence and incompetence. If Microsoft can't manage some level of data integrity, how can I trust anyone to?

I told this to Lut just now and he didn't even believe me. I had to show him the webpage. How is that even possible? How can you have nothing?

I was not one of the unfortunate ones whose Sidekick lost all memory during the outage. That happens sometimes; the memory gets wiped by a glitch, or a total loss of power, and your SK has to re-sync with the server to restore all data. It's happened to me a few times, but re-syncing doesn't take long and I never lost anything. Except that if it had happened to me in the last week, I would have. If it happens to me in the next few days, I'll lose everything.

But right now, my SK still has everything stored locally. Presumably, at some point they will finish restoring the server, sync, and back up the local data. One might guess that they will learn from this disaster and have better data recovery processes in the future, but I can't say that I really trust them, or anyone else, any more. So I just finished emailing each of my 100 contacts, one at a time, to my gmail account. So I've got a backup now.

...

Seriously? Nothing?

...

I think I'll go find a tool to back up my livejournals now.

Comments

[makovette.livejournal.com]

The number of people being fired on Monday from the responsible group will be Large.

Does the customers no good of course, but at least heads will roll.

CYa!
Mako

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I've heard of this sort of thing happening before, although not in a customer-facing context. Sometimes there's a fatal flaw in your backup procedure that isn't apparent until you first try to go and restore from the backups.

Like, tape drives that slowly shifted alignment as time went on, meaning that old tapes couldn't be read.

Or a script that moves backups around to make room for the most recent one, that through some programming flaw deleted the backups instead of moving them. One story I head of was one that through some y2k-like change in the environment suddenly shifted from 'working properly' to 'devouring all backups and taking down the original server too'.

So, it's not necessarily just 'we decided we didn't want to bother making backups'. Altough that's a possibility too. People *are* lazy.

[jurann.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the basis for a class action lawsuit! =D

[xthread.livejournal.com]

However much people may mock them, this is not a company widely known for gross negligence and incompetence.

Ahahahahahaha... <collapses in giggles>

Thank you, I needed a funny this evening.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

*boggle* That's ridiculous.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

Oh, really.

Up until YESTERDAY I had not lost data. YESTERDAY they pushed this broken patch to my phone, and it lost some pretty much irreplaceable stuff.

Yes, it is the 15th, yes, it was pushed WELL AFTER they knew it was broken, and yes, I had followed every bit of advice they gave EXCEPT for going through the step of manually going contact-by-contact through my phone to save a partial record to my SIM card.

And YESTERDAY the customer service agent told me that "They hope to be able to recover it soon."

I look forward to participating in the class action lawsuit if they don't.


AND, looking at the page in question, which I quote here:

Updated: 10/15/2009 1:00 AM PDT
Microsoft Confirms Data Recovery for Sidekick Users

Data Restoration to Begin as Soon as Possible for Affected Customers

Dear T-Mobile Sidekick customers,

On behalf of Microsoft, I want to apologize for the recent problems with the Sidekick service and give you an update on the steps we have taken to resolve these problems.

We are pleased to report that we have recovered most, if not all, customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage. We plan to begin restoring users’ personal data as soon as possible, starting with personal contacts, after we have validated the data and our restoration plan. We will then continue to work around the clock to restore data to all affected users, including calendar, notes, tasks, photographs and high scores, as quickly as possible.

We now believe that data loss affected a minority of Sidekick users. If your Sidekick account was among those affected, please continue to log into these forums for the latest updates about when data restoration will begin, and any steps you may need to take. We will work with T-Mobile to post the next update on data restoration timing no later than Saturday.

We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up. We rebuilt the system component by component, recovering data along the way. This careful process has taken a significant amount of time, but was necessary to preserve the integrity of the data.

We will continue working closely with T-Mobile to restore user data as quickly as possible. We are eager to deliver the level of reliable service that our incredibly loyal customers have become accustomed to, and we are taking immediate steps to help ensure this does not happen again. Specifically, we have made changes to improve the overall stability of the Sidekick Service and initiated a more resilient backup process to ensure that the integrity of our database backups is maintained.

Once again, we apologize for this situation and the inconvenience that it has created. Please know that we are working all-out to resolve this situation and restore the reliability of the service.


Sincerely,
Roz Ho
Corporate Vice President
Premium Mobile Experiences, Microsoft Corporation


Uh. WHY then did it flush my data YESTERDAY?
I will probably stick with T-Mobile, as 10+ years of customer loyalty seems to be worth something to them. I will, however, be changing my phone. And I expect them to eat the cost of swapping it.

[the-vulture.livejournal.com]

Crikey! Makes me glad I'm a Crackberry addict; I can take care of my own backups (saved on two different systems), so I don't have to worry about such strangeness.