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Microsoft Says Sidekick Data Recovery Will Be Underway Soon

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There may be hope for Sidekick users (at least those who didn’t throw their phones down the toilet). Microsoft is saying that they have recovered most, if not all of the user data that was lost in the recent fiasco. They are in the process of validating the data and will be pushed to users soon.

Microsoft statement after the jump.

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 https://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

Oct. 15, 2009

2 Comments

2 Comments

  1. GoodThings2Life

    10/15/2009 at 6:32 am

    As an IT guy, I have faced my own share of system failures and disaster recovery issues, and one of the worst I’ve dealt with was losing a week’s worth of information in an accounting system due to faulty backups and failed hardware. It really does take a lot of time not only to diagnose but to perform recovery and restoration of failed systems.

    That said, it still seems a bit absurd that such a massive failure happened like this. It’s one thing when you’re a small business and you make cost-cutting decisions to skimp on backup solutions, and it’s another to be a massive enterprise operation, take appropriate backups, and not properly test and verify those backups at least periodically.

    At least, in this circumstance, it looks like the results are going to be mostly positive in the end.

  2. Data Recovery Delhi

    12/31/2010 at 2:54 pm

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