Microsoft Sidekick destroys users data - don't trust the Cloud

Another event highlighting why Cloud Computing ain't there yet is the mass loss of data from users of Microsoft's Sidekick smartphone service.

See: Mass Outrage As Microsoft Sidekick Vaporizes Contacts For Thousands Of T-Mobile Users (MSFT)

Network World has a summary of notable cloud service problems: From Sidekick to Gmail: A short history of cloud computing outages

Any enterprise or individual who outsources critical data storage take note.

Comments

[Dave]

As an IT guy that is "standards" oriented and not "de facto standards" oriented, this outage is the perfect example of why Microsoft isn't ready for the back end. While Exchange is a marvelous communications platform, having a non-standard way of storing information leads to the problem of not being able to recover, as was demonstrated when trying to recover simple emails from an archive... It's so hard to do, it's basically impossible.

I just hope nothing like this ever happens to me.