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The Dark Side of the Cloud: Sidekick Customers Lose All Their Data

@ 2009/10/12

Cloud computing is one of the hottest buzz words in the computer industry today. All of the biggest companies -- Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Yahoo -- are trying to jump on it and figure out how to sell it to customers. However, outages in service have led many to doubt whether the cloud -- offloading storage, computing and other resources to a centralized external location -- is really such a good idea.

Microsoft's subsidiary Danger, purchased in 2008, is one of the most extensive adopters of cloud computing. All customers of the company's Sidekick phones use cloud services from Danger to provide information to contacts, calendars, IM and SMS, media player, and other applications on phone, and conversely to store data from these apps. The service seemed convenient and efficient.

Comment from Kougar @ 2009/10/14

It's not been a problem for me since I don't really have a use for the ability, but for the average user its another matter. My point was that it would be pretty nasty if users couldn't transfer data off their phone without paying for the program to do so, and something like this came along...

Comment from wutske @ 2009/10/13

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kougar

Do all phones allow that ability? My phone does not, can only connect it to the PC if I buy Motorola's software package.

Not all phones do support this, but if you look around on the internet you migth be lucky to find a free tool that does the job for you

.

Back when I has a K700i I used FloAt's Mobile Agent, it was a great tool and completely free

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FMA mainly supports SE mobile phones, but also some Nokias, Motorolas, ...

Comment from Kougar @ 2009/10/13

Do all phones allow that ability? My phone does not, can only connect it to the PC if I buy Motorola's software package.

Comment from wutske @ 2009/10/13

I can't believe people are stupid enough to only rely on a cloud service for backing up their data

.
I know it's not always easy to backup your phone, but if those Sidekick phone run Windows Mobile, than it's just a matter of installing a simple application and transfering all the data to your pc.

Comment from Kougar @ 2009/10/12

It's impressive to think they didn't back up that data at all to a different rack or something... sounds like gross negligence.

Just saw this bit:

Quote:

Update:: There is some speculation that this was not actually caused by a server meltdown, but by Danger’s failure to make a backup before a Storage Area Network upgrade that was botched.

BS like that is exactly why I would never trust cloud computing with my data. There will always be some admin gambling or taking shortcuts that eventually gets caught when they lose their bet.

Comment from jmke @ 2009/10/12

Main reason I keep an offline copy of all my emails, as well as offline copy of the [M] site

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