Internetnews.com mentioned on the 16th October that the bulk of the data had been recovered: “Microsoft today reports it recovered the majority of lost customer data for Sidekick owners amid a flurry of lawsuits filed yesterday over the recent server failure caused a service outage and data loss.” This is not quite the truth: no data has yet been recovered to users and it appears the problem may have been a failed firmware update to a storage subsystem which as a result caused database corruption. And so the saga drags on almost 2 weeks after Sidekick users were left without their information. Daniel Eran Dilger at RoughlyDrafted Magazine has written a biting piece on the saga – although he may be a bit hysterical about it all, the fact is that this problem happened under Microsoft’s watch and no amount of spin doctoring or news speak will allay the fact that Sidekick users don’t have their data.
Anyone worth their weight in IT gold knows to backup, to backup again, and back up again. When you’re finished there, go back up again. And for safety sake, just make another copy. Period!!! Systems fail, firmware updates fail, management requests that put your IT at risk fail, some gamma ray from the sun flips a bit. The point is that problems will happen – accept this and build IT systems that cater for them.