
Microsoft Confirms Data Recovery for Sidekick Users - dragonquest
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/oct09/10-15sidekick.mspx
======
idlewords
This is great news for sidekick users. But it makes me all the more eager to
see a post-mortem - who decided it was a good idea to announce total data loss
so soon? In every other case I can remember, the responsible parties made lots
of noise about taking every possible step to recover data before finally
admitting failure.

The celerity of the Sidekick announcement made it sound like their entire
datacenter had fallen into a crater of hot lava during a SAN upgrade - no
chance of recovery even by poring over the drive platters in some clean room.

On the plus side, I bet it's a great time to buy a Sidekick. That data center
is going to be staffed by sysadmins fed on champagne and foie gras, with
octuple off-site backups.

~~~
dtf
It's almost an application of the old business maxim, "underpromise and over-
deliver", although I can't really imagine it being done on purpose. Now I have
this image of Steve Ballmer storming in to Danger HQ after reading all the
headlines and twitter shitstorm, throwing some chairs around and yelling "I
don't care if you have to invent a f---ing time machine, you're getting that
data back!".

~~~
jrockway
Trust me... if time travel were possible, Ballmer would have already used the
MS time machine to go back and wear some antiperspirant to that "developers,
developers, developers, developers" thing.

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mr_luc
First of all -- did I see a post on here saying that the people "launching
_rumors_ against MS" need to take responsibility? That seems odd.

This press release is a masterpiece. Here's the bit that sounds the best:

    
    
        We now believe that data loss affected a minority of Sidekick users
    

Possible Translation Given That Wording: 51% or more of our customers have
kept their Sidekicks charged, so the data is still on their phone and they are
not "affected" by data loss.

    
    
        We plan to begin restoring users’ personal data as 
        soon as possible, starting with personal contacts, 
        after we have validated the data and our restoration plan.
    

They haven't even begun restoring data. "Recovering" it from a hard drive in a
_broken_ cloud infrastructure is the same as recovering it from a broken
physical hard drive -- if you ever find yourself doing that for your
customers, and explaining that the situation is under control, you screwed up
in ways that are difficult to fully expletize.

But then to brand this press release as

    
    
        MICROSOFT CONFIRMS DATA RECOVERY FOR SIDEKICK USERS
    

Whoa.

I suppose it's a necessary level of ass-hattery; the situation is entirely
negative. Your mobile cloud infrastructure just lost peoples' data, and did it
so spectacularly that your corporate partner fed you to the sharks; it's
probably worse than a Blue Screen of Death during a product launch.

So that title is technically true. In that they are _planning_ on trying to
recover the data ("after we validate the data _and_ _our_ _plan_ ").

Beautiful, PR people.

 _slow_ _clap_.

~~~
eli
Not sure what you're getting at. They didn't say "100% data recovery." In fact
the release clearly says that some people might not get everything back.

But that's a pretty huge improvement over the previous release from T-Mobile
stating that everything was lost for everyone, with almost no hope of
recovery.

------
BSousa
What I would like is to see some responsibility of the people that have been
launching all the rumors against MS. The first two articles I read about this
mentioned that MS had no backups at all, which apparently are just out right
lies and caused much of the MS backlash (as usual) based on nothing more than
rumors.

I know this is the internet, and I'm happy for the Sidekick users that got
their data back, but I'm starting to get fed up with most tech news websites
that pride themselves to be the first to deliver the news that don't actually
exist.

~~~
mustpax
There was a press release directly from _T-Mobile_ declaring that the data was
gone, and it was most likely not coming back. That's as credible as any news
can get, and no organization can be blamed for publishing that.

Also, the fact the MSFT is recovering the data does not mean that they had
backups, they might be manually recovering the data from the disks instead
(and given the timeframe of the recovery that sounds about right).

It's true that web journalism has a tendency to jump the gun, but not this
time. This was a fully corroborated story worth publishing.

~~~
CWuestefeld
_the fact the MSFT is recovering the data does not mean that they had backups_

ahem. From the OP: "We have determined that the outage was caused by a system
failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up."

~~~
tsuraan
That sounds a lot more like master-slave database replication than actual
backups. The key difference being that you can roll back to your backups; when
the slave replicates the invalid data of the master, you're hosed.

~~~
eli
Agreed. I'm assuming a bit here, but the release makes it sound like they
pieced data back together from log files, not restored to an old snapshot.

------
wallflower
If you look at the wording of the original press release - it never mentions
backups. It talks about "in hopes of discovering some way to recover this
information. However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely."

In this latest press release, however, it seems like the backup process
_itself_ was flawed. The backup database became corrupted.

"Outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core
database and the _back-up_."

"Microsoft said it had taken steps to strengthen the stability of the Sidekick
service and started a more resilient backup process."

"more resilient backup process to ensure that the integrity of our database
backups is maintained."

So perhaps the rabid bloggers (even though they may have overshot themselves
declaring no backups) were on the right trail. But a flawed backup system is
the same as no backups, right?

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870410720457447...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107204574475032328975504.html)

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rbanffy
Seriously, the idea of having the data on the cloud is very appealing, but
only as long as the infrastructure is properly managed.

That's probably the only reason for tolerating MS Exchange. The phone
integration - calendar, contacts and mail - are excellent - and you manage the
server the way you see fit.

On the other hand, you get an Exchange server to manage.

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mattmaroon
In that case they totally let this story get away from them. All I've heard
(and not on tech media outlets either, but on NPR and the like) is that the
data was gone forever. They should not have allowed that story to run
uncorrected while there was still a chance it could come back.

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johnnybgoode
So the whole thing was a Microsoft conspiracy to make people think twice
before trusting the cloud? Just kidding. ;)

