14 DAY TRIAL // The Sidekick data loss / recovery issue will still have to wait for a few more days before everything is put back in order. Redmond-based software company Microsoft (which acquired Danger, the company in charge with the Sidekick data, last year) announced on Sunday that users might see their data restored this week.
“The Danger / Microsoft team is continuing to work around the clock on the data restoration process. We apologize that this is taking so long, but we want to make sure we are doing everything possible to maintain the integrity of your data. We continue to make steady progress, and we hope to be able to begin restoring personal contacts for affected users this week, with the remainder of the content (photographs, notes, to-do-lists, marketplace data, and high scores) shortly thereafter,” Microsoft says in a press release.
As many of you might already know, the Sidekick users took a great hit when the servers where the data on their handsets was backed up went down a few weeks ago. The issue proved to be much bigger than originally believed, as both the first server and the backup one went down, and some of the Sidekick users were facing massive data loss as soon as they tried to reset their devices.
Following the outage, Microsoft / Danger and T-Mobile (the carrier that sells the Sidekick devices) announced that the user data stored on their servers might have been compromised, though they managed afterwards to recover “most of, if not all,” of the Sidekick data. According to the two companies, only a small percent of users were affected by the outage, and “this data restoration effort is only necessary for customers who lost data from their Sidekick devices.”
“We appreciate your ongoing patience,” is the sentence that ends the announcement, yet one might already know that some users lost that patience already, and sued Microsoft and T-Mobile for losing their personal data. Since the lawsuits were filed before the two companies managed to recover the Sidekick data, it will be interesting to watch how things evolve, since there are already some who believe that some of the charges no longer apply.