T-Mobile: Missing Sidekick data "almost certainly has been lost"

The Sidekick was one of the first phones to keep all your e-mail, contacts, events, and photos in an online "cloud"; cool, right? But in the wake of a critical server outage more than a week ago, frustrated Sidekick users are learning the hard way that when things go wrong, cloud computing isn't all it's cracked up to be.

In what's shaping up to be one of the worst tech train wrecks of 2009, T-Mobile and Microsoft (owner of Sidekick developer Danger) admitted Saturday that any contact, events, or to-do lists that haven't already been restored following a massive server meltdown earlier this month are probably gone forever.

"Our teams continue to work around the clock in hopes of some way to recover this information," the message from T-Mobile reads. "However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely low." The message promises an update sometime today (Monday the 12th).

Meanwhile, it's still not clear what caused the server outage—which left Sidekick users without any data access at all for days on end—in the first place (although there are some theories floating around). Tellingly, the Sidekick and Sidekick LX are currently listed as "Temporarily Out of Stock" on T-Mobile's Web site.

T-Mobile has already told Sidekick users that it will give them a month's worth of data for free in the wake of the outage, and the carrier also posted a F.A.Q. on how to restore your Sidekick contacts from vCard files, Outlook, or a SIM card.

But many Sidekick users looked to be out of luck Monday, with who-knows-how-many contacts, calendar events, to-dos, and e-mails vanishing into the ether. Indeed, more than a few angry users on T-Mobile's message boards were already grumbling about lawsuits.

In the end, though, nothing (short of a miracle on T-Mobile and/or Microsoft's part) will bring the lost data back, and that brings us to the moral of the story: Backup your data, especially the stuff that's floating up in a cloud somewhere.

Now, keeping recent backups of your most critical data—including your contacts and e-mail—to an external hard drive or a stack of DVDs is a time-consuming pain, no question, and if you're lucky, you'll never even use them.

But here's the thing: Stuff happens, and you don't want to be high and dry when it inevitably does. (I'm reminded of this classic line from an old Richard Gere movie: "First thing that I ask a new client is "Have you been saving up for a rainy day? Guess what? It's rainnnniiiing!" And by the way, he's laughing when he says that last word.)

Yes, I know that Microsoft/Danger should never have lost all that data to begin with (or should have kept a reliable backup), but as someone who's lost their fair share of info due to failed hard drives or flaky servers, I've learned the hard way that there's no substitute for keeping a local backup.

That's especially important when it comes to free, in-the-cloud e-mail account like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail—both have methods for quickly exporting all your contacts and events to a local file, and I also urge you to sync your e-mail to a local client like Outlook or another mail program—and then back that up, too. (I've got about six years of e-mail sitting on multiple backup drives and DVD-Rs at home.)

All that said ... to those of you Sidekick owners who are still missing data, I feel your pain—and I think you deserve a full explanation from T-Mobile and/or Microsoft of what, exactly, went wrong, and how they're going to keep it (or try and keep it, at least) from happening again.

So, who out there is still missing Sidekick data? Did anyone manage to get their contacts and other info back?