The fiasco over the weekend with T-Mobile Sidekick and Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft, struck a cord with me. If you haven't heard, their server that held nearly a million users' contacts, emails, photos, and appointments went kaput. That, by itself, isn't fatal. It happens all the time in the technology world. What's astounding - and inexcusable - is that they didn't have a backup. Yep. All of that personal data were lost. Unbelievable that something like that could happen to the two companies involved. T-Mobile and Microsoft were the biggest of the big. There was just no way. But it did.
I had a similar incident happened to me just a couple weeks ago. My database server crashed and the table that held all of the article headlines and teasers disappeared on me. Yes, disappeared. Let me explain. You see, when the database crashed, that table became corrupted. All of the data was still stored in the table though. All I had to do was issue a simple repair command to fix it. Because the table contained millions of articles, it occupied a couple GB of hard disk space. In the mysql manuals, it always warn the user to backup a table before repairing it. It was a couple GB; it would had taken a while to back it up. Meanwhile, my site was down and out. I didn't have time to back it up. I went ahead and did the repair. When the repair was done, I got some error messages. The main one being that it was unable to do the repair because of some reason. Fine. I had other methods to do the repair and hopefully, one of them would work. I noticed that I suddenly had a couple GB of additional free space. Odd. And then I noticed that the table I was repairing was no longer there. My stomach didn't feel too good afterwards. I had more space on my server because that table I was repairing just turned into thin air when the repair didn't go through. I did have a backup, but it was a couple months old. I did a lot of work on the site in those couple months. Luckily, my ISP still had a copy of my site from a couple weeks ago. I only ended up losing a couple weeks of data. Afterwards, I started making daily backups. Yes, I would have to shut my site down for 5-10 minutes. Yes, it would also take about an hour to download the backup to my desktop. It's not fun, but my stomach will be ulcer-free.
You would think that companies as big as T-Mobile and Microsoft would be more discipline and competent than an amateur like me. Yes, I'm an amateur. I've only just recently learned all of this system administration stuff from operating the website. The Sidekick had a nice feature. All of your personal data on the phone was stored on Microsoft's servers and can be accessed through the phone and T-Mobile's website. When you upgrade your Sidekick, you don't have to backup anything; it just all magically syncs up the data on the servers with your new phone. You can also make changes on the website to your contacts or calendar, and have those changes appear on your phone. You can even go to the website and share photos that you've taken with your phone. It's such a great feature, Microsoft even copied it for their Windows Mobile phones with a new app called My Phone. It does the same thing. Now, I wonder how this latest utter failure will affect people's trust of that service. It shouldn't. Unlike the sidekick, personal data on WM phones are also stored locally, so the My Phone service would only act as an additional backup.
More importantly, how will this affect future Sidekicks? When I had my Sidekick 2 a long time ago, I actually liked it. It has a large screen, was easy to use, and the full qwerty keyboard was great for emails and IM. The only reason I stopped using it was when I accidentally broke the screen while I was moving furniture. Yeah, never leave your phone in your pocket while moving. If you have to, face the screen inside to protect it. I've since moved on to a smartphone - the discontinued T-Mobile MDA. I'm still using it. It's a very hackable phone. I'm running WM 6.5 on it now. I'll probably use the My Phone service to backup my personal data. And it better not crap out on me - or else, it's time to switch to either Google or Apple and another carrier.
