Like a character you thought was dead and gone, at least some lost Sidekick data is coming back. That's the news from Microsoft, which said Tuesday that it has begun restoring personal information  that it had earlier said was accidentally lost during a service outage.
In a statement, the Microsoft/Danger team said it was "now ready to make the first phase of content restoration," beginning with personal contacts.
'A Few Clicks and a Confirmation'
Sidekick users can log into the My T-Mobile web site and use a recovery tool to restore contacts. The tool allows users to view contacts on the device as of the first of this month, and, with "a few clicks and a confirmation," the contacts can be restored.
For users who have already re-created the contacts, the tool allows keeping both sets, merging them, or just keeping the set now on the device. A user can also edit any duplicates after data has been restored.
The statement said the team continues "to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week to restore your data," and that it was "making solid progress on the next phase" of restoration, which includes photographs, notes, to-do lists, marketplace data, and high scores.
Earlier this month, Microsoft and T-Mobile announced that Danger, a Microsoft subsidiary, experienced a "data service disruption" that erased all Sidekick users' contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists, and photos. The Sidekick smartphone features social connectivity, so the personal data is essential to many users.
T-Mobile had said it would send a $100 "customer appreciation card" to customers who experienced significant loss. The card, which can be used toward products and services from T-Mobile, was in addition to a free month of data service that had already been offered. The card was available if there was a permanent loss of data, so, as data gets restored in pieces, the status of the card isn't yet clear.
No 'Real Impact'
Some industry observers have said the Sidekick wipeout could be a fatal blow to the device, especially given the competition it faces from smartphones that could have greater appeal to the same youth market. The fact that at least some of the data is being restored could temper that perception, but, until the extent of the restoration is clear, the full impact isn't known.
Other observers have wondered if the well-publicized incident could raise questions about cloud computing in general. But Al Hilwa, program director at industry research firm IDC, doesn't expect it to hurt cloud computing's growing popularity.
He said he doesn't see "any real impact" on cloud computing, except that picking a reliable vendor, as in all commerce, is always essential. "It's very, very hard to lose data today," he said.
Hilwa added that, even when hard drives physically crash, there are ways to recover data. Although the practices of Microsoft's Danger are not yet known, Hilwa pointed out that backups are standard IT practice, and this episode may well result from issues with Danger's "governance " -- such as not making backups frequently enough to represent current data.
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