Why do clouds suddenly disappear?

Posted on 13-10-2009

As the cloud becomes more lucrative as a destination for your data, instances such as the Twitter leak, the many Gmail outages, and now the T-Mobile fiasco have made it clear that it is not as reliable as we might think.

Certainly the cloud will always hold a certain appeal, upload it once, and you're done! The cloud if everywhere, and so is your data. The ubiquity of the internet is what has resulted in the feasibility of devices such as the SideKick, which store all user data on the cloud. Now however the illusion that your data is safest in the cloud is lost.

Since the beginning of this month, T-Mobile SideKick customers had been facing a total outage, with no access to their data, with a lack of local storage this meant that a simple restart of the device would mean a total loss of all your private data.

While the services started coming back, T-Mobile customers werefaced with a reality they'd never hoped they'd have to face, in the form of this sentence in their letter:

"Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger."

Furthermore they stated that "the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely low."

I have had more than my fair share of failed hard disks and scratched disks, the cloud seemed like a good place to store my data. After all, I figured those people have redundant backups, and failsafes to a much higher degree. The fact that Microsoft did not even have a backup of data which they know exists only on their servers, a data that they charge for to protect, is a huge wake up call. How safe is your data really? It is now clear that the cloud isn't that backup utopia as the cloud storage companies always try to sell it.

For customers who have been experiencing this hell, T-Mobile has an offering, $100 to buy yourself a new life (only valid on T-Mobile products and services), and a free month of data services from T-Mobile to lose it all over again.