No silver lining here
Cloud computing is the future, or so we're told. Soon you will be unconstrained by the specs of your own device as you'll access and store everything you need remotely from huge server farms designed specifically to withstand any conceivable threat.
Well, try telling users of T-Mobile's Sidekick smartphone that today, as it emerges that all their painstakingly acquired personal data - contacts, calendar entries, photos, etc, - has most probably been lost thanks to a server fail at prophetically named cloud services provider Danger, which was acquired by Microsoft in early 2008.
In a plaintive message to all Sidekick users over the weekend, T-Mobile wrote: "Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger's latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device ... that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger."
Oh dear. It goes on to say that they're trying to recover the data but that they're not optimistic. It then recommends users go to the Sidekick forums to get some top tips on how to start rebuilding their personal data once more. It also promised an update today, but we'd yet to see one at time of writing.
The irony is that Microsoft has always insisted that the ‘cloud-only' vision is flawed, because people will always want to be able to work off-line if they can't get connected to a network. If Microsoft wanted to manufacture a case-study to warn people of the dangers (pun intended) of the ‘cloud-only' model, it couldn't do much better than this.
We would like to hear from any HEXUS readers who have been personally affected by this. Share your experiences in the HEXUS.community discussion forums.
