Things can only get better
It looks like Microsoft and T-Mobile have under-promised and over-delivered on the matter of the loss of personal data for some users of the Sidekick mobile phone cloud service, which is provided by Microsoft's Danger division.
This morning Microsoft issued a press release that a copy and paste of a message sent to all T-Mobile Sidekick customers from its VP of premium mobile experiences, Roz Ho, entitled "Microsoft Confirms Data Recovery for Sidekick Users".
"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," continues the message, asserting that Microsoft reckons only a minority of users were affected and promising to commence restoration "as soon as possible".
The only explanation for what happened went as follows: "We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up." Now, we might not know much about data storage, but surely the main point of a back-up is that it isn't affected by whatever misfortune strikes the main system...
In a classic piece of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, Ho wrote: "...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." Microsoft and T-Mobile will be hoping Sidekick users, present and future, treat this as a one-off and don't get too spooked about leaving all their personal data in their hands.