Users of the Sidekick mobile phone are being warned that personal data which they believed to be safe online in “the cloud” may be lost forever following what appears to be a disastrous server failure.
T-Mobile in the USA has suspended sales of the Sidekick cellphone, as Microsoft – who runs the Sidekick data service – scramble to see if it’s possible to recover the contact lists, calendar items, photos and other personal information of thousands of phone customers.
In the meantime, the best advice the companies can offer worried Sidekick users is to not turn off their phones or let their batteries drain. Ominously, it sounds as if the chances of all lost data being recovered are remote.
Any company – even Microsoft – can have a server problem, but there should always be reliable backup systems in place should a disaster happen.
According to a…
Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.
Found this article interesting? Follow Graham Cluley on Twitter or Mastodon to read more of the exclusive content we post.
