Microsoft: We've recovered most Sidekick data
Microsoft said Thursday that it believes it has recovered most of the Sidekick data that it initially feared might have been permanently lost.
"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," corporate vice president Roz Ho said in a letter to customers."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."
On Wednesday, at least two lawsuits were filed against Microsoft and T-Mobile over the Sidekick outages, which began at the beginning of the month with data service interruptions and have left many users without access to their address books.
Microsoft had said on Saturday that it believed all data that was not on users' phones was probably permanently lost. However, by Monday it was sounding more optimisitic it could recover the data.
Here's the full text of the letter:
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 the T-Mobile Sidekick forum at http://www.t-mobile.com/sidekick 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
Update 10:10 a.m.: Amended letter to include Microsoft's final wording of letter, which said it believes it has recovered "most, if not all" data.
During her years at CNET News, Ina Fried has changed beats several times, changed genders once, and covered both of the Pirates of Silicon Valley. These days, most of her attention is focused on Microsoft. E-mail Ina. 
We will be using Linux and MySQL from now on.
After this failure I think Microsoft will transition at least part of the key infrastructure to Windows, even though imho the problem is process and not technology. But they probably have a lot of learnings from building Azure which they could leverage at Danger.
This may provide MSFT with the necessary database downtime to migrate to technology they are familiar with and can support. It's much harder to work on a live database as you are no doubt familiar with. Perhaps they can get off the flakey Danger created/supported system entirely.
Obviously they cannot run the thing properly.
If it is Linux/Oracle/Java/ stack, then the only excuse left is bad management.
What about recovering those data deleted by the new feature of Snow Leopard? "
It happened to very few Snow Leopard users (insert snarky remark about the small number of Mac users). The SideKick loss happened to what percentage of the users?
Bringing up Apple's OS X Snow Leopard data loss issue seems a bit unrelated and only mentioned here to poke fun at Apple and their users (of which I am one). Don't be surprised if people bite back in their comments.
Perry_Clease:
There are many more OS X Snow Leopard users than there are Danger customers in the world. Unfortunately Apple will never make public the true extent of the issue or the number of people involved so it is impossible to tell. It doesn't look like Microsoft is going to give us numbers either. Both indicate it's a small minority of total users so I think the point of comparison is moot there.
Yeah right.
Now that they have replaced it with Microsoft's amazing stable stuff, all is OK.
Turn bad management into a PR stunt. That is one way to make a bad situation look good.
Databases can be tricky things when you deal with user accounts.
Kinda like the "logic bomb" guy a while back.
- by AppleSuxLeo October 15, 2009 7:22 PM PDT
- Tweens across America rejoice !
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