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."

Comments

As if millions...

[Anonymous Coward]

homemade cell phone porn videos cried out and then were silenced.

"they should have used ZFS or btrfs"

[Manip]

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.

Perhaps they should have had at least mirrored or stripped raid, with an off-site backup every week or so?

Re:"they should have used ZFS or btrfs"

[timmarhy]

retarded comments like that are the reason these zealots aren't taken seriously in the enterprise.

i'd hazard a guess that the offsite backups were corrupted as well somehow or were silently failing.

Re:"they should have used ZFS or btrfs"

[rastilin]

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.

Re:"they should have used ZFS or btrfs"

[gravos]

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).

Re:"they should have used ZFS or btrfs"

[sopssa]

Exactly, this can be a software bug too and that could possibly easily destroy or corrupt backup data too. I really doubt this service was ran without backups.

The type of filesystem has nothing to do with this.

Re:"they should have used ZFS or btrfs"

[Znork]

I really doubt this service was ran without backups.

Knowing 'enterprise' backups I'd bet there was at least a backup client installed and running. However, I'm equally sure that the backups were, at best, tested once in a disaster recovery exercise and were otherwise never verified.

Further, responsibility would probably be shared between a storage department, a server operations department and an application management department, neatly ensuring that no single person or function is in the position to even know what data is supposed to be backed up, what limitations there are to ensure consistency (cold/hot/inc/etc), to monitor that that's actually what does happen and that it keeps happening as the application and server configuration evolves.

Backups of dubious value do not seem to be a rarity in enterprise settings.

Re:"they should have used ZFS or btrfs"

[malchus842]

One reason why our corporate policy is that we actually have to validate backups for every system on a regular basis (this means doing a full restore of a tape called from off-site), where the regularity is directly proportional to the criticality of the system. The more critical, the more often we test. On our iSeries, they restore the weekly backup tape EVERY week on the QA server - both for the purposes of refreshing it, AND to validate the backups. We also have a quarterly 'random' test where a system is chosen randomly and it must be recovered from bare metal using only our standard procedures + the backup tape.

We've discovered all kinds of strangeness with backup tapes through the years. Our Tier 1 systems have completely separate instances in geographically diverse areas, with data-replication.

Granted, this isn't cheap, but our data isn't either.

Re:"they should have used ZFS or btrfs"

[WarlockD]

Ever try to restore from a ZFS corruption? It IS easy and it can be done. However...

What if the data was on an EMC storage array and the tech told them its all lost? What if your dealing with a Teir 1 vender (I am looking at you Dell Equallogic) that swears UP and DOWN that there is no way to recover the system after a second drive out of a RAID 5 has been pulled? Hell, try just a standard raid 5 card from a Teir 1 vender. (Not talking about calling like 3ware support directly, they are honestly good and recovered a few arrays with them)

I "suspect" that they are running it off a storage array that failed big time, or lost the LUN, or just someone decided to die and take the server with it. There is just to much we don't know. Was Dagger installed on multi-servers? Was it clustered? Is it a cloud system? Does it run its own storage system or requires additional hardware?

But you know what? ZFS, EMC even Windows 2008, All moot. Why? WHERE ARE THE TAPE BACKUPS?!?! SERIOUSLY. The ONLY way they have lost ALL that data was that they didn't have backup solution. Otherwise their "press release" would say "...however we will be restoring the data from last week/months tapes..."

I do like how they keep saying "Microsoft/Danger" as if they are at fault. A good admin would expect a new car would catch fire and run into a bus full of nuns.

Re:"they should have used ZFS or btrfs"

[mike260]

There are plausible reports as to how this happened here.

tl;dr - They tried upgrading their SAN without making a backup first, and the upgrade somehow hosed the entire SAN.

Re:"they should have used ZFS or btrfs"

[Anonymous Coward]

Repeat after me, you haven't got backups unless you've tested RESTORES.

Re:"they should have used ZFS or btrfs"

[Rakshasa Taisab]

A bug that sneaks into the two or three offsite locations, destroying the tapes which are randomly checked before being shipped to ensure they contain valid data? Really nasty those bugs.

Re:"they should have used ZFS or btrfs"

[asaul]

Dubious backups? Depends. We had a system which was a 6TB cluster that was notoriously difficult to back up. This went on for years, it took too long, failures caused issues downstream etc. Then someone took a moment to realise that the application was not capable of re-using that 6Tb of data if it was restored - once the data came in it was processed and archived. To recover the application all they had to do was backup a few gig of config and binaries, and restart slurping data from upstream again. Viola - backup stripped down to nothing, 6TB a day of data less to backup, and next to no failures as it was now so quick to backup.

Then there is the case of an application which the vendor and application developer signed off on using a backup solution using a daily BCV snapshot. What they failed to tell us was application not only held data in a database, but in a 6G binary blob file buried deep in the application filesystem. If the database and the binary where out of sync in any way, it could mean missed or replayed transactions or generally that the application was inconsistant. As this was an order management platform, that was bad. You can guess the day we found out about this dependancy.... yup, data corruption, bad vendor advice screwed the binary file and all we had to go on was a backup some 23 hours old where the database was backed up an hour after the application. Because of a corresponding database SNAFU, the recover point was actually another day before that, with the database having to be rolled forward. It was at this point we found out the despite the signed off backup solution, the vendors documented recommendations (that were not supplied to us) was that the only good backup was a cold application one - not possible on a core order platform. Thankfully after some 56 hours of solid work the application vendor managed to help sort the issue out and the restore from backup was not actually needed. The backups were never really tested as the DR solution worked on SRDF - the DR consideration for data corruption was never really part of the design (from a very high level, not just this platform).

So there you have it. Two dubious Enterprise backups - one not needed, the other not usable.

Re:"they should have used ZFS or btrfs"

[petes_PoV]

It's not a backup unless you can prove it will restore. Until then it's just a waste of tape, or disk, and time

The point about backups is not to tick the box saying "taken backup?" but to provide your business / customers / whatever with a reliable last resort for restoring almost all their data. If you don't have 100% certainty that it will work, you don't have a backup.

Re:"they should have used ZFS or btrfs"

[bertok]

There are plausible reports as to how this happened here.

tl;dr - They tried upgrading their SAN without making a backup first, and the upgrade somehow hosed the entire SAN.

That's the thing that has always worried me most about SANs: you have all your eggs in one basket. No matter how redundant or reliable the hardware is, one bad update or trigger-happy admin can cause the instant loss of all your data. That's only slightly better than having your data center burn down. You still have your hardware, but a total restore like that can be a nightmare. I've heard somewhere that 80% of corporations couldn't recover from a scenario like that.

Here's some fun numbers: a typical tape restore runs at something like 70MB/sec, if you're lucky, per tape drive. Some small low-end SANs that I see people buying these days are 10TB or bigger. At those speeds, it takes 40 hours to restore the complete system. What's worse is that it doesn't scale all that well either, you can get more drives, but the storage controllers and back-end FC loops become a limit. If you have some big cloud provider scenario, a complete restore could take days, or even weeks.

What's scary is that mirroring or off-site replicas don't help. If your array starts writing bad blocks, those will get mirrored also.

Re:"they should have used ZFS or btrfs"

[vk2]

Thats why you have logical redundancies. I work for a fortune 10 company and this is a standard practice for all mission critical applications. The application has be to geographically redundant with install base at least at 3 data centers (ATL,SEA and DLS). Different SAN technology at each DC. All Oracle databases have 2 physical dataguard configuration with 4 hours and 8 hours latency (to guard against user errors) and all J2EE apps hard configured to switch connections from one db to the other almost on the fly or with a reboot. Some really really critical databases have all this and transaction duplication via Goldengate to remote databases to off load reporting queries. We have had issues where SAs screwed up allocating LUNs and ended up f*cking up the file systems but we recovered in every scenario even a 30 TB DB restore over 2 days.

Its amazing a consumer serving company like T-Mobile risked itself by hosting their application on Microsoft platform;. Furthermore where is the DR in all this? Who the F*ck in the right mind fiddle something on SAN without confirming a full backup of all applications/databases? It appears that Hitachi and Microsoft are at fault here (if SAN maintenance is the root cause of this failure) but T-Mobile is the fool allowing these companies to ruin their data. Not only there won't be any consequences because of this issue to MS or Hitachi - T-Mobile will be pouring in more money to fly in the MS and Hitachi consultants.

Re:"they should have used ZFS or btrfs"

[IamTheRealMike]

I'm not sure what you mean by "cloud provider" as such but Google App Engine has always been replicated across datacenters.

Re:"they should have used ZFS or btrfs"

[jimicus]

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:

• Nobody checking the logs
• Failure to understand the processes necessary to get a good backup. (You can't just dump the files that comprise a database to disk - you must either quiesce the database or use the DBMS' inbuilt backup routine - or you will wind up with inconsistent files and hence an inconsistent database. You'd be amazed how many people don't understand this.)
• Failure to maintain backup processes. (When you moved the database to another disk because you were running out of space, you did update your backup process? Right?)
• Not doing any test restores.
• Not doing enough test restores, or doing them carefully enough. (If you're unlucky, your database will come back up OK even though you didn't quiesce it before carrying out the backup. Why do I say unlucky? Well, if it had not come up OK, you'd know immediately that there was a problem with your process. Then once the database is back up, make sure you check the restored data to ensure that recent transactions which should be on the backup actually are).

Re:"they should have used ZFS or btrfs"

[Jezza]

The kind of filesystem have help - I'm familiar with ZFS concepts so I'll stick to those:

In ZFS when you write to a file you don't write over the pre-exisiting data, you write elsewhere then that gets mapped in upon success, the old data is still there and you can see the aged mapping (you know what was there). Now you can at this point recycle this space. However, you can switch this pruning off, now you have a complete record of everything that was ever done on the disk. To stop it ever running out of space I can either: Add disks to the disk-pool to stop that, or prune very old data (older than a give age - maybe 6 months?).

So it helps.

Re:"they should have used ZFS or btrfs"

[drjzzz]

It's not a backup unless you can prove it will restore. Until then it's just a waste of tape, or disk, and time

True. There's a similar problem in biological research, where people think they have secured frozen samples but they haven't tested whether the samples are valuable after thawing. For example, frozen cells might not be viable, or RNA might be degraded. Too often the samples are just wasting freezer space. Anybody can freeze (or backup), the question is whether what you thaw (restore) is valuable.

Re:"they should have used ZFS or btrfs"

[Antique Geekmeister]

It's not the gray hair (or what is left of it!), and those aren't wrinkles. They're laugh lines from the terrific amusement when some youngster ignores the hard-won lessons of the last millennium, especially when they have to call me or someone like me to clean up the mess. The laugh lines are especially deep from when I collected a paper trail to show where their supervisor ignored my written warnings about the danger: those are used with caution, but can be very, very handy.

Re:"they should have used ZFS or btrfs"

[cbreaker]

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.

A server failure?

[corsec67]

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?

Re:A server failure?

[Hadlock]

Reportedly sidekicks are thin clients, other than making phone calls, everything on the phone is saved on the server side. Which is a special kind of retarded, in today's world where a blackberry performs all the same functions, and provides a local backup feature. But yeah as for the backups, all your backups are worthless if your data backup code is flawed, and nobody ever checks the backup tapes. When MS bought the service, they probably changed the location the servers were in, plugged everything back in, and kept going. I imagine a project like that would be on a short timetable, and "checking to see that the backup tapes are really being backed up to" is low on the priority list when the service is already live.

Re:A server failure?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

A server failure caused all of the data to be lost?

Maybe it was the server failure . . . maybe they only had one . . . ?

Re:A server failure?

[Serious Callers Only]

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.

Re:A server failure?

[Locutus]

in hindsight, firing the person(s) doing backups was probably not a good move. ;-)

LoB

What about the backups?

[christwohig]

So are we saying microsoft didn't have a backup? what about a offsite backup? Who wants to bet they were using their own backup solution? if they had a decent storage array they could have had snapshots and offsite replica's to restore from

Sidekick

[nadaou]

shit, is that TSR still hanging around? goodness!

If the above means anything to you, "apt-get install joe mc" will make you smile as well.

Backups?

[ipsi]

Either this is a really, really serious meltdown which completely killed not only the server but all their backups as well (and what're the chances of that?), or their IT guys have been really, really slack and just didn't make any backups...

Guess they should have used a better smartphone, like *anything* else on the market... Even the cloud-centric Pre will still work if you don't have access to the Cloud - even if Google and/or Palm dies, you'll still have all your information on your phone! Jesus... Doesn't inspire confidence...

Re:Backups?

[TheSunborn]

Or this was really a software error, and the backup servers in an other datacenter, just copied the faulty data/delete command.

They should really be far to big to have all their data stored in a single datacenter with no offsite backup. (Or they should have an entry on thedailywtf.com)

Microsoft/Danger

[delta98]

'nuff said.

It's The Backups Stooped

[tres]

This is an issue of irresponsibility. Plain and Simple. The company responsible for maintaining the data should -- at the very least -- have had some full system backup from last month. If they had some old backup somewhere at least you could chalk it up to systems failure or bad backup tape or bad admin or something.

But the fact that there is no backup anywhere indicates brazen negligence on the part of everyone responsible for the data. Everyone who had a part in designing the system and managing the system is culpable. The most ridiculous part of this is the over-reliance on server-side data storage by the sidekick designers.

Re:It's The Backups Stooped

[1s44c]

But the fact that there is no backup anywhere indicates brazen negligence on the part of everyone responsible for the data. Everyone who had a part in designing the system and managing the system is culpable. The most ridiculous part of this is the over-reliance on server-side data storage by the sidekick designers.

I will bet you there were good people -SCREAMING- to fix the backups, implement and test failover and all sorts of other good things. In my experience things like this are due to management refusing to spend money fixing problems that have not lost customers yet.

Re:Why not store the data on phone permanent memor

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Microsoft was testing the US gov edition

[AHuxley]

Right feature, wrong server? MS understands the need for a "Rose Mary Stretch" default setting.
The congress critters have learned a lot from the "terrible mistake" of email backups.
From cute page boys to Iran contra, MS can market this as a feature.

DIY phone backups

[golfnomad]

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!

WTF

[ShooterNeo]

This is unbelievably bad. The real problem is : why aren't there incremental off site backups to another server farm? A weekly binary difference snapshot would have made this failure less catastrophic.

Ultimately, with a complex application like this, you can't guarantee 100% that the code doesn't have a bug in it that could result in loss of user data. You can be ALMOST sure it won't, but 100% is not possible with current analysis techniques. (even a mathematical proof of correctness wouldn't protect you from a hacker)

But a properly done set of OFFLINE backups, stored on racks of tapes or hard disks in a separate physical facility : you can be pretty sure that data isn't going anywhere.

Re:WTF

[Locutus]

from that sounds of it, Microsoft couldn't turn Danger into a WinMo platform so they gutted it of employees instead of spinning it back off since they'd rather have it dead than spreading more Java but not dead before they had Pink out the door. So when you fire everyone from the top downward, you end up with people who's job is to turn the lights off when the doors get locked for good. they're not motivated much nor are they skilled in all of what used to be required to run the shop. Auto-pilot mode comes to mind.

So maybe the backup system needed to be checked or a CRON job verified or maybe the computer in Joe Fired's office was part of the backup process in some little way but important enough that the whole job was failing every night.

As I said, Microsoft tried to replace the Danger stack with Microsoft software but it wasn't going to work or got too much backtalk( thinking of Softimage ) and threats of everyone leaving if they had to port to the WiMo pile/stack. They moved anyone who'd go, over to Pink and left the rest to keep life support systems running. oops, they failed.

With Ballmer publicly saying that WinMo has been a failure, he's hearing the press say WinMo 6.5 is a yawn and expectations are that the Sony PS3 will eclipse MS XBox, and recently reading about how he's telling people that IBM doesn't know what they are doing....There's probably a new monkey-boy dance going on inside his office we'd probably love to see. It might be too dangerous being so close as to record it.

Will Microsoft ever make any profits from anything outside of MS Windows and MS Office? Ballmers 8-Ball still seems to be telling him something very different from what everyone else is seeing.

LoB

Re:See it as an opportunity

[AnotherUsername]

Now is the opportunity for opensource to show what it's good for. Someone whip together a small app to extract all info from the Sidekick, put it up on sourceforge for FREE and you have tons of goodwill for OSS. Of course, the app should be Linux-only, thus forcing all Sidekick users to install Ubuntu...

Thus eliminating any goodwill that would have been gained...

Really, if you think that open source is a viable option for the masses, you shouldn't care which operating system a powerful application like the one you describe is on. If you really care about using open source for goodwill, releasing it simultaneously on all operating systems should be your goal. How is forcing people to use Ubuntu via software applications any different from Microsoft forcing people to use Windows via software applications?

RIP Sidekick

[drinkypoo]

With all the competition in the smartphone market today, this is probably an unrecoverable error. If they manage to recover the data then they will come off as heroes for having the courage to tell their customers promptly. Otherwise they just look like they are: incompetent. No great loss, though.

This may have to do with the "Pink" project fiasco

[HonestButCurious]

According to a very long article on AppleInsider:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/10/09/exclusive_pink_danger_leaks_from_microsofts_windows_phone.html&page=3

MS was misleading T-Mobile about the state of Sidekick support, and apparently charging hundreds of millions every year for, and I quote "a handful of people in Palo Alto managing some contractors in Romania, Ukraine, etc". This is apparently because most of the Sidekick devs had either moved to Pink or quit out of disgust.

Interesting article about Pink/Danger/Sidekick

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Interesting article about the Microsoft/Pink/Danger/Sidekick relationship and leaks indicating that Microsoft are trying to kill Sidekick without telling the partners. Microsoft would never do such a thing of course ...

Rich.

It is an ancient story, endlessly repeated

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.

Re:It is an ancient story, endlessly repeated

[harmonise]

Get into the shower with BubbaSoft and you know what is going to happen.

Just don't drop the SOAP.

Re:Irresponsibility to EPIC proportions. -- yes

[MrCrassic]

A) The Sidekick apparently doesn't store anything, so customers can't make backups that easily, even if they wanted to, and

B) Danger designed this phone to store everything server-side. It is incomprehensibly foolish to not include a SUPER SOLID backup strategy as well. This problem has been ongoing for several days now; I don't know if the data was fine on the onset of this problem, but the infuriated customers have all the right to demand everything AND the kitchen sink for losing practically everything they had.

Yesterday... all those backups seemed a waste...

[argent]

Yesterday,
All those backups seemed a waste of pay.
Now my database has gone away.
Oh I believe in yesterday.

Suddenly,
There's not half the files there used to be,
And there's a milestone hanging over me
The system crashed so suddenly.

I pushed something wrong
What it was I could not say.
Now all my data's gone and I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay.

Yesterday,
Need for backup seemed so far away.
Seemed my data were all here to stay,
Now I believe in yesterday.

Anonymous

I work in telecom - Sr Tech Arch

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in telecom at a different provider. SAN upgrades are performed by the SAN vendor and, IME, they always demand a complete backup prior to starting any work unless the customer demands otherwise. If the customer doesn't want the backup, we always had to get a Sr VP to sign off. There were about 10 Sr VPs in the company - not like at a bank where everyone is a VP.

Usually, we would perform firmware upgrades only when migrating from old SAN equipment into new. The old equipment would be upgraded and used to upgrade either lower performing SAN or directly attached disk arrays that had been neglected for 5+ years. Being out of warranty was avoided. Most data is too important to risk that.

BTW, we measured storage in petabytes and our storage team was **never** on the cutting edge. We were always 2+ years behind other BIG companies. Our labs may have this quarters' latest and greatest, but it would take years to get from the lab into production service. That drove some vendors nuts, but not the "names you know."

I saw where someone above said they randomly verified recovery quarterly. What a joke. On my systems (Sr Tech Arch), we deployed with redundant systems at least 500 miles apart. Many systems did have instant fail over, but if instant fail over was not possible due to the amount of data, **never** would we lose more than 24 hours worth of data. Between, RAID-10, near disk backups, tape backups, remote replication and backups at the alternate location, we had the data. Further, to verify the alternate system worked, we swapped primary production locations every week. I and my internal customer slept very well, thank you.

I have a good friend who works at T-Mobile in their architecture design team. It will be interesting to see whether this subcontractor had anything to do with the issues. I called T-Mobile for an unrelated personal item on Tuesday, they were already swamped with calls and said that a sub to Microsoft was working the issue. I'm thinking MS outsourced/bought the provider and the garage shop team was still running things - but I don't know. I do know that Microsoft has excellent engineers for systems like this and they are more cautious than google with their upgrades and deployed systems. Over the years, I've had to deploy a few Windows-Server-based solutions - usually for voice response systems. I was never really happy doing it. I don't trust backup systems much unless it is really a mirror that I can get to 1 file from 3 weeks ago easily.

Ok, back to upgrading the company email servers. A system version upgrade will impact users for less than 10 minutes - probably under 3 minutes, but we like to under promise and over deliver.

The Tao of Backup

[ei4anb]

Sadly it comes to pass that every generation the Tao of Backup is forgotten and must be relearned through such trial by fire. http://www.taobackup.com/

Re:Thin client: Android, too?

[RedK]

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.

Claimed information from the inside

[cshbell]

According to this comment post on Engadget, it was a contractor working for Danger/Microsoft who screwed up a SAN upgrade and caused the data loss. Obviously, take this with a grain of salt until it's substantiated:

"I've been getting the straight dope from the inside on this. Let me assure you, your data IS gone. Currently MS is trying to get the devices to sync the data they have back to the service as a form of recovery.

It's not a server failure. They were upgrading their SAN, and they outsourced it to a Hitachi consulting firm. There was room for a backup of the data on the SAN, but they didn't do it (some say they started it but didn't wait for it to complete). They upgraded the SAN, screwed it up and lost all the data.

All the apps in the developer store are gone too.

This is surely the end of Danger. I only hope it's the end of those involved who screwed this up and the MS folks who laid off and drove out anyone at Danger who knew what they were doing.

"Epic fail" doesn't begin to describe this one.

You assume Danger used a MSFT platform

[xswl0931]

Looking at the timeframe that Danger was acquired by MSFT and that the Danger OS was likely based on NetBSD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_Hiptop), it's more likely that Danger was still using NetBSD as their Server Software and this was merely a process issue. Blaming it on the "Microsoft Platform" without any real data is just spreading FUD.

The value of data

[symbolset]

Granted, this isn't cheap, but our data isn't either.

Microsoft bought Danger for half a billion dollars. Current estimates of the value of this data are roughly... half a billion dollars, plus a little. There's little doubt that in addition to destroying the entire value of the acquisition they've created a connection between "Microsoft", "Danger" and "data loss". In their release T-Mobile isn't being shy about tying those things together. Not good. That's going to have impacts even for some completely unrelated cloud-based products like Azure.

Somebody's about to get a really awkward performance review.