Over a week ago, many students experienced a rude awakening when powering on their T-Mobile Sidekicks. Personal data, from contacts to multimedia, was missing.
According to T-Mobile, phones can now recover contact lists.
In a statement released on Oct. 6, the cell phone maker said “Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, 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.”
Due to a Microsoft Corporation server breakdown last week, phone numbers, photos and personal data was wiped from Sidekicks nationwide.
Senior sports management major Brandon Crump was a Sidekick user since the model first came out.
“I had no problems with the phone until recently when Danger/Microsoft lost their service,” he said. “I lost over 800 contacts, and didn’t have a data signal for a week.”
Crump also lost pictures and notes; he is still without contacts.
Authorities initially announced that large amounts of T-Mobile’s Sidekick subscribers’ data, which was stored entirely on Microsoft servers, had been lost and that no backup existed for the user data.
Two weeks later, on Oct. 15, after the initial statement, Roz Ho, Microsoft’s vice president of Premium Mobile Experiences, issued an apology for the outage and announced that the company had determined that, contrary to initial reports that all the data was permanently lost, the company now thought that it should actually be able to recover most of the data that had been lost, but that the recovery effort would take some time.
“We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the backup,” Ho explained in a statement. “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 owns the maker of Sidekicks and oversees its data services. Tuesday, the company announced a recovery tool on T-Mobile’s Web site.
The recovery tool can only currently restore contacts and the company says it’s working on also recovering photos, notes, to-do lists, high scores in downloaded games and other data.
T-Mobile provided subscribers with instructions on how to restore their data and merge the restored contacts with the information they currently had.
In addition to contact data, the announcement said, “We’re making solid progress on the next phase in this restoration process, including your photographs, notes, to-do lists, marketplace data and high scores. We appreciate your ongoing patience.”
Patience is not something users like Crump had; he replaced his Sidekick with a Blackberry.
Danger Incorporated, the maker of Sidekicks, was bought by Microsoft last year. According to the company, the outage was due to “a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up.”
Microsoft said it is working on data stability and backup process.
T-Mobile has stopped selling Sidekicks and their web site currently lists the product as “out-of-stock”.
The company is providing all Sidekick users with a free month of data services, and the compensation was posted to accounts on last Friday.
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