Quite a few T-Mobile customers using the Sidekick aren't very happy. Data that had been backed up through Microsoft/Danger had been thought lost, though now there appears to be hope of recovering at least some data. Everyone from average folks with photos backed up to business people with work contacts are running the risk of losing all or most of their data, unless they backed up their data locally. Is this a warning about the dangers of cloud computing? Some will say yes, I say "not exactly."
There is a certain amount of risk involved in cloud computing. Sending and receiving data to an external storage system involves the chance of interception or corruption and, of course, there can be a failure on the cloud and data can be lost. Failures like this can happen locally as well. It's just a matter of scale.
Think about a plane crash. If a small plane carrying a family of five goes down it's tragic, but unless the circumstances were particularly suspect it won't get national attention for much longer than a day, if that. On the other hand, if an airliner carrying 200 people crashes you'd better believe we'll be hearing about it for weeks. While both incidents were terrible and sad, the larger of the two catches more attention because of the size of the catastrophe.
None of that is to make light of victims of plane crashes. The point is that there are server failures in small, medium and large businesses every day around the country and the world. The smaller of these never get any attention. Regular, non-business users are even less likely to back up their phone data, unless it's automated, and lose their data when their phone is lost, stolen or damaged. The situation with T-Mobile is noteworthy only for the scale of the problem. It also demonstrates the need for an extra layer of protection: local backup.
If you have valuable data, whether personal or business related, don't count on only one method to protect your information. Utilize the cloud, but also keep a local backup. At my home I have an external memory for the family desktop and my laptop, and quite a few of our pictures and documents are stored various places online. If one storage method fails, the loss isn't total.
See Also:
T-Mobile, Microsoft tell Sidekick users we "continue to do all we can" to restore data (Network World)
Microsoft Sidekick users lose data (Telegraph)
T-Mobile Will Compensate Sidekick Users (PC World)
Sidekick users may regain lost data, Microsoft says (Computerworld)
Sidekick users share their horror stories (CNET News)
0 comments:
Post a Comment