Microsoft salvages Sidekick data

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 15 Oct 2009 at 10:13

Microsoft claims to have recovered "most, if not all, customer data" that was lost during the recent Sidekick storage fiasco.

The Sidekick smartphone stores much of the user's personal information online, rather than on the device itself. This cloud is maintained by Microsoft's rather unfortunately named Danger subsidiary, which suffered a massive outage last week, leaving thousands of Sidekick owners without access to their contacts, calenders and photos.

This data was originally thought lost, with a T-Mobile and Microsoft releasing a joint statement apologising for the problems. However, in a happy turnaround the software giant is now claiming the data is recoverable, after all.

We've rebuilt the system component by component, recovering data along the way

"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," Microsoft says.

"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.

The company has also promised to put measures in place to ensure it doesn't happen again.

The onus is now Apple, which has recently been forced to admit that Snow Leopard has been eating customer's data.