Is the way T-mobile stored Sidekick data standard to most cell phones or unique?

[Disclaimer: I don’t have a T-Mobile account nor a Sidekick]

The information is stored on your phone, too. But you’re supposed to be able to recover information from their servers.

Indeed, T-Moble even implies this saying:

…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.

My question would be to ask which copy is the Master and which one is used to resolve conflict? On my Blackberry, this is configurable to a degree. I would hazard to guess that if your Sidekick is config’d to rely on the server copy as the Single Version of Truth, then well, you might have a very significant problem.

—

What is strange is that Microsoft planned so poorly when they attempted to upgrade their SAN storage. There are a myriad of ways to ensure this kind of problem does not happen. And apparently, Microsoft didn’t care to implement any of them.

Now there’s a company that takes your money and gives you very little in value in return.

What puzzles me is, with her old phone, she put in her contacts, it went to the sim card, it’s still on the sim card. With stuff she’s done on the Sidekick, none of that ever moved to the sim card, because what’s on there is what was on there 2.5 years ago. I had no idea. And yeah, OK, they say don’t remove your battery, but usually what’s the first thing you do if your phone goes wonky like these did? You remove your sim card and try to re-seat it, that has fixed more than one phone problem in my experience, so that’s what my wife did, and of course to do that, you have to remove the battery. Or what if they go dead? Well, the sidekick battery lasts maybe a day or two tops, the phone is prone to dying, so hers did that as well. Maybe the stuff would have still been resident on the phone had the battery never been taken out or discharged, but that seems doubtful to be honest because her stuff was gone before she did either of those things. Yes, I wholeheartedly agree, that in 2009 there’s no excuse for not having redundant backups, ESPECIALLY when we’re talking about MICROSOFT! But it just seems weird that they designed the phone to not default to having it store the data somewhere semi-permanent, and having what was stored remotely be the backup. Is that normal, is that a smartphone thing, or is it just a T-moblie has its head up its ass like usual thing?

And of course they didn’t tell you not to remove the battery until 5 days after the service went down and all the info was gone. Too little, too late. And they assured me that it was just a matter of time before the data came back, that removing the battery would if anything just slow down the process of recovery. Basically they outright lied to their customers, they designed a product which if anything should have had MORE protections from data loss, then didn’t spend the money to even back up the data? I think I’m about to play some hardball when it comes time to negotiating compensation. They didn’t pay to keep it from happening, methinks they should pay now….hopefully Sidekick customers will stand up and make it cost 5 times as much for them as it would have if they hadn’t been so cheap in the first place so other companies won’t pull a stunt like this.

This is why you create your own back up. I don’t know the Sidekick but Blackberry makes it quite easy to create a back up of your data to your pc. All data servers are backed up to tape or should be so I don’t understand how T-Mobile doesn’t have even a single back up to restore from. I’m sure their customers would be happy with some of their data back even if it wasn’t the most recent. No one who wants to keep their data relies on a single computer to house that data. Hardware failures are still quite common. If T-Mobile was backing up data like most companies do, they wouldn’t be in this mess. Glad I’m not a T-Mobile customer!

I guess in regards to a backup, my assumption was that the SIM card was your backup, because that’s where the phone book has resided in every other phone I’ve had. With things like pictures, yeah you download those to your PC every now and again, but basically the camera to me is a convenience on my phone, I may take a shot every now and then if I don’t have my digital camera, and sure I’ll download the pics from time to time, but you kind of figure as long as I’m not dropping my phone in a toilet or something, those pictures should still be there, right? At least that’s what I always assumed. I’ve certainly never seen anything in print or on the drop down menus on any of the phones I’ve ever had that talked about backups, if there’s a way to do a full backup of your Sidekick data, they sure hide it well. And I’m sure as confused as anyone how they couldn’t have a single usable backup, I mean the company I worked for 15 years ago used a Grandfather/Father/Son backup scheme, this is 2009 for chrissakes.

@dalepetrie, the SIM card is likely the main image. It’s local, fastest to access, and available when the network is not. Whatever is up on the servers is the backup. (The phone itself has a trivial amount of on-board memory… almost everything you’d have, certainly media files, would be on the SIM card)

Word on the street is that Microsoft sub-contracted out their SAN (a bunch of really fast disk drives that work in concert) upgrade to Hitachi. Hitachi then apparently did not take the proper precautions before beginning their work.

But really, that’s just a bunch of passing the buck.

While a SAN may employ some sort of RAID (a way to combine disks together for speed and robustness), it’s not in and of itself a backup. That’s usually a completely separate process, often to tape, but increasingly to another set of hard drives, and is something absolutely vital in mission critical applications… like your customer’s data. For best safety, the backup site should be physically remote in case of some environmental catastrophe to your primary data center.

So while Hitachi should’ve had their own snapshot in order to ensure the fastest recovery possible from a potential snafu, Microsoft/Danger absolutely dropped the ball by not having an enterprise backup solution in the first place as well as letting Hitachi to proceed in slip-shod manner in the second.

People will definitely lose their jobs over this.

Wow… this story gets crazier and crazier. AppleInsider is reporting all kinds of additional back story, including the possibility of sabotage:

—
An act of sabotage “would explain why neither party is releasing any more details: for legal reasons dealing with the ongoing investigation to find the culprit(s),” one of the sources said. Due to the way Sidekick clients interact with the service, any normal failure should have resulted in only a brief outage until a replacement server could be brought up.

The very long outage of core functionality, followed by an incapacity to recover any data, both point to the possibility that “someone with access to the servers at the datacenter must have inserted a time bomb to wipe out not just all of the data, but also all of the backup tapes, and finally, I suspect, reformatting the server hard drives so that the service itself could not be restarted with a simple reboot (and to erase any traces of the time bomb itself).”
—

…and goes on the explain why you shouldn’t allow the Sidekick device to power down:

—
The Sidekick was designed under the assumption that the cloud would always be available, and that your data would be safe there, so the device doesn’t try very hard to preserve your data if you were to yank the battery or in the rare event of a phone OS crash/reboot. Instead, under these circumstances the device starts from an empty database and then reloads all of your data from the service when it comes back up.
—

Sabotage is typically an unlikely scenario. However the article goes to great lengths to explain the rift between parent Microsoft and absorbed Danger personnel… so it might be possible someone with access might’ve been able to slip thru the cracks.

And the Sidekick operation relying so heavily on the cloud sounds bizarre to me. Completely contrary to conventional wisdom. However, the current malaise being experienced by you and other Sidekick owners certainly seems to reinforce the article’s description of its operation.

—

[Disclaimer: AppleInsider can’t be relied on for unbiased opinion of Microsoft. And especially not this particular reporter, Daniel Eran Dilger. I caution against accepting the article as fact without further corroborating evidence.]

@robmandu – first off, wow, sabotage? Very interesting that they designed this device under the assumption that they didn’t need to do too much to keep the data locally, really what it seems to boil down to.

But like you said, the SIM card is the main image, or at least it’s SUPPOSED to be. But for the Sidekick, it seems that the SIM card doesn’t really work was any image at all, since nothing she’s done in 2.5 years is resident on the SIM card, not even media files (she did lose about 3 pictures in addition to the notes on her calendar and her address book).

Thanks for doing so much legwork on this. I’m going to guess from what you’re telling me that most phones aren’t designed like this, most phones, if not all other phones on the market, do put most of the data, such as phone book and pictures on the SIM card (though I had a Razr and my phone book moved over but my pics did not when I switched phones, I think this might be another T-mobile special however as the only way for me to get pictures off my phone was to upload them to T-mobile’s online photo storage service at 20 cents per data message, as there was no computer interface when I plugged the phone in). Anyway, thanks again, this is all really fascinating. I did recently hear it may come back too, so we’ll see.