T-Mobile Sidekick: The case of the reappearing data

We reported earlier this week about how a massive cloud failure has wiped out the data from T-Mobile sidekicks. This was based on T-Mobile's repeated assertion that their data "almost certainly has been lost." The latest news, however, is that Microsoft had recovered most of this supposedly lost data.

Interestingly, the official statement from Microsoft--according to Roz Ho, a corporate VP at Microsoft--was that "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."

You can expect conspiracy theories to abound with this latest flip-flop, as if the original news didn't generate enough waves as it is. While the primary suspect would be that of a miscommunication between T-Mobile and Microsoft, I feel that the stakes were much too huge for such a simple snafu to occur. My personal guess is that T-Mobile probably balked at the cost of rebuilding the system "component by component" while Danger was in no position to finance it.

Well, until Microsoft decided to step in due to the sheer negativity that the news generated, and pay for the expensive restoration work. This would be especially pertinent given Microsoft's Cloud ambitions from its Cloud-based Windows Azure, to Cloud-hosted versions of Microsoft Exchange, and its upcoming Office Suite.

I would love to hear your take on this matter.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Information Week

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