Microsoft Confirms Data Recovery for Sidekick Users | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Confirms Data Recovery for Sidekick Users

microsoft.com

38 pointsdragonquest17 comments

This is great news for sidekick users. But it makes me all the more eager to see a post-mortem - who decided it was a good idea to announce total data loss so soon? In every other case I can remember, the responsible parties made lots of noise about taking every possible step to recover data before finally admitting failure.

The celerity of the Sidekick announcement made it sound like their entire datacenter had fallen into a crater of hot lava during a SAN upgrade - no chance of recovery even by poring over the drive platters in some clean room.

On the plus side, I bet it's a great time to buy a Sidekick. That data center is going to be staffed by sysadmins fed on champagne and foie gras, with octuple off-site backups.

It's almost an application of the old business maxim, "underpromise and over-deliver", although I can't really imagine it being done on purpose. Now I have this image of Steve Ballmer storming in to Danger HQ after reading all the headlines and twitter shitstorm, throwing some chairs around and yelling "I don't care if you have to invent a f---ing time machine, you're getting that data back!".

Trust me... if time travel were possible, Ballmer would have already used the MS time machine to go back and wear some antiperspirant to that "developers, developers, developers, developers" thing.

I suspect it was just T-Mobile getting carried away. I'm sure they were dealing with thousands of angry calls and wanted to blame someone else ASAP.

First of all -- did I see a post on here saying that the people "launching rumors against MS" need to take responsibility? That seems odd.

This press release is a masterpiece. Here's the bit that sounds the best:

    We now believe that data loss affected a minority of Sidekick users

Possible Translation Given That Wording: 51% or more of our customers have kept their Sidekicks charged, so the data is still on their phone and they are not "affected" by data loss.

    We plan to begin restoring users’ personal data as 
    soon as possible, starting with personal contacts, 
    after we have validated the data and our restoration plan.

They haven't even begun restoring data. "Recovering" it from a hard drive in a broken cloud infrastructure is the same as recovering it from a broken physical hard drive -- if you ever find yourself doing that for your customers, and explaining that the situation is under control, you screwed up in ways that are difficult to fully expletize.

But then to brand this press release as

    MICROSOFT CONFIRMS DATA RECOVERY FOR SIDEKICK USERS

Whoa.

I suppose it's a necessary level of ass-hattery; the situation is entirely negative. Your mobile cloud infrastructure just lost peoples' data, and did it so spectacularly that your corporate partner fed you to the sharks; it's probably worse than a Blue Screen of Death during a product launch.

So that title is technically true. In that they are planning on trying to recover the data ("after we validate the data and our plan").

Beautiful, PR people.

slow clap.

Not sure what you're getting at. They didn't say "100% data recovery." In fact the release clearly says that some people might not get everything back.

But that's a pretty huge improvement over the previous release from T-Mobile stating that everything was lost for everyone, with almost no hope of recovery.

What I would like is to see some responsibility of the people that have been launching all the rumors against MS. The first two articles I read about this mentioned that MS had no backups at all, which apparently are just out right lies and caused much of the MS backlash (as usual) based on nothing more than rumors.

I know this is the internet, and I'm happy for the Sidekick users that got their data back, but I'm starting to get fed up with most tech news websites that pride themselves to be the first to deliver the news that don't actually exist.

There was a press release directly from T-Mobile declaring that the data was gone, and it was most likely not coming back. That's as credible as any news can get, and no organization can be blamed for publishing that.

Also, the fact the MSFT is recovering the data does not mean that they had backups, they might be manually recovering the data from the disks instead (and given the timeframe of the recovery that sounds about right).

It's true that web journalism has a tendency to jump the gun, but not this time. This was a fully corroborated story worth publishing.

the fact the MSFT is recovering the data does not mean that they had backups

ahem. From the OP: "We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up."

That sounds a lot more like master-slave database replication than actual backups. The key difference being that you can roll back to your backups; when the slave replicates the invalid data of the master, you're hosed.

Agreed. I'm assuming a bit here, but the release makes it sound like they pieced data back together from log files, not restored to an old snapshot.

Do you work for Microsoft? I just have to know. I mean, this is a joke post, right?

    a system failure that created data loss in the core 
    database and the back-up. We rebuilt the system 
    component by component, recovering data along the way.

MS has to recover the data, hard drive by hard drive, like forensic scientists at a freaking crime scene, reconciling the corrupted backups with the corrupted originals, trying to piece together the real data.

We're going off of the press releases by the two companies involved, chum.

Microsoft's partner was apparently so pissed at Microsoft's incompetence that it threw up its hands and said, "Well, MS, we're just going to tell them what happened. Deal with it." And that's what most of the news stories were based off of.

And, frankly, it's pretty on-target. If they had or didn't have backups, the forensic data recovery off of physical disks would take about as long as whatever ad-hoc process they're apparently using to reconcile the corruption in live and backup data.

So I don't think there's any way a reasonable person would "get fed up" with the "MS backlash", as it's not based on "nothing more than rumors" but the corporations' own statements.

If Microsoft had proper backups it would not take more than a week to recover them. T-Mobile's original statement was probably made at the point where Microsoft admitted they had no backups and perhaps T-Mobile jumped the gun a bit saying there was no chance of data recovery. Presumably they were not too happy with Microsoft and welcomed the bad PR the original statement would bring.

If you look at the wording of the original press release - it never mentions backups. It talks about "in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information. However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely."

In this latest press release, however, it seems like the backup process itself was flawed. The backup database became corrupted.

"Outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up."

"Microsoft said it had taken steps to strengthen the stability of the Sidekick service and started a more resilient backup process."

"more resilient backup process to ensure that the integrity of our database backups is maintained."

So perhaps the rabid bloggers (even though they may have overshot themselves declaring no backups) were on the right trail. But a flawed backup system is the same as no backups, right?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870410720457447...

Seriously, the idea of having the data on the cloud is very appealing, but only as long as the infrastructure is properly managed.

That's probably the only reason for tolerating MS Exchange. The phone integration - calendar, contacts and mail - are excellent - and you manage the server the way you see fit.

On the other hand, you get an Exchange server to manage.

In that case they totally let this story get away from them. All I've heard (and not on tech media outlets either, but on NPR and the like) is that the data was gone forever. They should not have allowed that story to run uncorrected while there was still a chance it could come back.

So the whole thing was a Microsoft conspiracy to make people think twice before trusting the cloud? Just kidding. ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com