Microsoft recovers lost Sidekick data

Graham Cluley
Graham Cluley
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Earlier this week I blogged about the catastrophic story of how Sidekick customers were facing the loss of their personal data, as it appeared that Microsoft’s backup systems had failed to come to the rescue after an outage on their servers.

It now appears that all data stored on the T-Mobile Sidekick’s online service (personal data such as contacts, photos, calendar appointments) will be restored.

A public statement from Roz Ho of Microsoft explains that “the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up” and apologises for the inconvenience caused to Sidekick users who were warned not to allow their cellphones to power-down during the outage.

So, a close escape.. but remember, if you have important data think very carefully about how you would recover if your own copy were sitting “in the cloud”.

This may not be the last we hear of…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, or drop him an email.