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Server Failure Destroys Sidekick Users' Backup Data
Expanding on the T-Mobile data loss mentioned in an update to an earlier story, reader stigmato writes "T-Mobile's popular Sidekick brand of devices and their users are facing a data loss crisis. According to the T-Mobile community forums, Microsoft/Danger has suffered a catastrophic server failure that has resulted in the loss of all personal data not stored on the phones. They are advising users not to turn off their phones, reset them or let the batteries die in them for fear of losing what data remains on the devices. Microsoft/Danger has stated that they cannot recover the data but are still trying. Already people are clamoring for a lawsuit. Should we continue to trust cloud computing content providers with our personal information? Perhaps they should have used ZFS or btrfs for their servers."
A server failure caused all of the data to be lost?
No backups? Not even a spare server with a mirror of the data? No servers in different places? No off-site backup strategy?
As an aside, why would that data be stored in volatile non-battery backed up ram? All of my graphing calculators have a special battery to keep the ram, and they aren't even supposed to store important stuff. Flash is cheap enough these days, why should simply removing the battery cause important data to be lost?
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This seems a rather silly point to make. I know this is Slashdot and we have to suggest Open Source alternatives but throwing out random file systems as a suggestion to fix poor management and HARDWARE issues is some place between ignorant and silly.
Not as silly as it might appear. One of ZFS's main functions is that it can compensate for some degree of hardware failure.
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Because the entire Sidekick architecture is very client-serverish, not transparent as with ordinary phones (GPRS/EDGE/UMTS/etc. through a NAT to internet at large); the server is supposed to be responsible for all that data, and the phone is just caching it. Given that architecture, asking why the local copy is on volatile RAM is analogous to asking why your CPU doesn't have a battery backup for system RAM, or even L2 cache.
That's one of the big reasons I didn't go with a sidekick, even though they have (or had, last I was shopping around) basically the cheapest internet plans available; they push all sorts of stuff that's handled by the phone in any other system off to the Danger servers,. While that does expose you to other people losing your data, as seen here, I didn't even consider that. I just like having a direct internet pipe, so I can run whatever software I want locally.
That said, there are plain benefits to the Sidekick model, for some people. Basically, if you don't want to do funny stuff on your phone, and if you're no less incompetent than the MS/Danger sysadmins, it's better. After all, if you drop your sidekick in a toilet, run over it with a truck, and vaporise it with a plasgun, you can just get a new one and have all your data back -- which is good, since if you're 95% of people, you've _never_ backed up your phone's data. But it's not for me, and given your desire to have your phone work as a PDA even if you power-cycle it in a wilderness/cave/other net-less place, it's not for you either.
The current major cloud providers (Google and Amazon) both replicate your permanent data to multiple hard disks (Google: 3, not sure about Amazon) in multiple areas of the datacenter, and I know Google is looking at providing replication to different datacenters (which is more complex than replication in the same datacenter because of the time delay).
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There are 3rd party apps out there that will let you "backup" your phone data yourself. I personally use a program called bitpim www.bitpim.org (make sure you d/l latest version). It works with many different phone models and I have used it several times to "restore" my phone data (had 2 phones with hardware issues). It restored my calendar, notes, phone book and rings tones (that last one can save you d/l $$$). It is easy enough to install and use, you do not have to be a total geek to make it functional (but having one available to help you set up backups would probably help). Been working in the IT industry too long to rely on someone else backing up my data for me, and I will not encourage Murphy to have a party in my honor!
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I'm not sure what you mean by "cloud provider" as such but Google App Engine has always been replicated across datacenters.
I've always been amazed that tape is trusted as much as it is. It seem (anecdotally at least) to have a disproportionately high failure rate.
I'm not sure that's the problem so much - after all, LTO has a read head positioned directly after the write head and automatically verifies as it goes along. A tape error is dead easy to spot.
There are a number of places where things can fall apart, and tapes don't even need to come into the matter:
No, it's not how Android works, or how the iPhone works either. You can have cloud enabled applications, but you can also have local storage based ones without any problems. There is nothing in the SDKs that force you to use the cloud for storage at all.
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Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
The technology is available to get good, solid backups for anything. They just didn't use it, test it, verify it, etc. And in the case of this, users cannot back up their own data. And what they lost isn't backups.
I used to have one of these things.
The phone is (like someone above pointed out) a local cache of what's on the server side. The live database/back end is what crashed. When you make a change on the phone, it immediately sends that change to the server. You can login to the sidekick web site and make changes there, which appear quickly on your phone. If you reboot your phone, it will retrieve anything it needs from the server side. Apparently, the phone doesn't even keep a permanent local copy on some sort of non-volatile storage (hence "Don't turn off your phone.")
It's like someone that uses Google apps and stores all their documents on their system. If that system should go down, you'd be screwed, except that you COULD back up your documents locally. With this case, you can not.
I don't really like the term "cloud computing." All it means is server storage somewhere on the Internet. Under this term you could call any web site a "Cloud." It's ambiguous at best.
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