Danger over as silver lining found in Sidekick snafu

Good news for T-Mobile Sidekick users on Friday, as service provider Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft, announced the recovery of user data thought irretrievably lost.

The resilience of the cloud as a data storage medium was called into question earlier this week, when T-Mobile USA’s Sidekick users were told a glitch had wiped out user data stored in the cloud.

Fortunately however, Danger has now said that it has “recovered most, if not all, customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage,” which means missing data should soon be restored.

Danger has revealed that that the outage was caused by a system failure that affected the core database and the back up. Since rebuilding and recovering the data, the firm said it has made changes to improve the overall stability of the Sidekick service and “initiated a more resilient backup process to ensure that the integrity of our database backups is maintained.”

The Danger service backs up all content stored on the device – contacts, photos, messages etc. to a cloud computing system run by the providers. Cloud computing is all the rage, and is a strategy being pursued by almost all players in the mobile space including Google, Nokia, Palm, Apple, as well as the multitude of operators that offer back up services to their customers.

T-Mobile has not yet started reselling the device after pulling it from shelves earlier in the week.