I have a bad feeling about this…

Some network engineer is probably feeling really shitty about himself at this very moment, and probably will have to go into a witness protection program after less tech-savvy Sidekick users learn what’s going on and go after him with torches and pitchforks.

T-Mobile and Danger, the Microsoft-owned subsidiary that makes the Sidekick, has just announced that they’ve likely lost all user data that was being stored on Microsoft’s servers due to a server failure. That means that any contacts, photos, calendars, or to-do lists that haven’t been locally backed up are gone.

The first question any computer geek will ask is how in the world did Microsoft / Danger / T-Mobile not have a backup of all their users’ data? Merely having a week-old or month-old backup would have alleviated the shit storm that is certainly going to develop over this SNAFU. How could a simple server upgrade of this magnitude not have been double- and triple-checked before going into production.

And the talk of a class action lawsuit is over personal data (I assume most business people wouldn’t be using a Sidekick for business purposes)! Working in the health IT industry, I can only imagine the fallout that would happen if someone said, "Oh, overnight we lost all your patient data and we don’t have an upgrade." The thought is absolutely terrifying.

But with all this talk of backing up sensitive data and not trusting cloud computing, I’m being quite hypocritical here. I don’t use POP3 to backup my Gmail mail; I don’t backup my 6+ years of digital pictures; and my digital audio is only partially backed up only because it’s on my Zune.

There is a certain level of trust we place in companies to maintain the safety of our data. Knowing the kind of scrutiny Google works under, I trust that they won’t lose my e-mail and I’m glad that’s the case because I really don’t feel like storing and backing up 2.5GB worth of e-mail myself (most of which is probably newsletters and spam). Microsoft was also a big enough company that I would’ve trusted them to not do something so amateurish and stupid, but here they’ve gone and proved me wrong. Granted, this was a Microsoft subsidiary and not 100% Microsoft.

As for my digital pictures? I’m just praying right now that my Western Digital 500GB hard drive doesn’t kick it in the near future. I’ve been eyeing 1.5TB hard drives (currently ~$80 USD) as a storage solution, but I just can’t justify spending money on storage that I don’t need right now. Hopefully I won’t have to learn the hard way…