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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."
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.
How do you kill that which has no life?
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).
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
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!
There's some interesting background leaks on the takeover of Danger in this article which seem to imply they cut a lot of staff, and gutted the company, which is now running on a skeleton staff. So I guess it's not too surprising when this sort of mistake is made. Not the most reliable source, but they did definitely cut a lot of danger staff after the acquisition.
It is development dome.
Two companies enter, MS comes out, slightly fatter.
If you do business with MS, you are riding a tiger with the brains to realize that lunch is only a roll on the ground away.
MS really should be renamed to BubbaSoft. Get into the shower with BubbaSoft and you know what is going to happen.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM