Cloudburst

While some folks have been pushing Cloud Computing as the next great thing, there has been a rather nasty cloudburst. to start things off.  Over the weekend, many T-Mobile Sidekick owners were struck with a lightning bolt from these clouds as owners lost contacts, calendar data, to-do lists, and their photos. This loss was due to a “glitch” at Danger, a company owned by Microsoft. This did not impact all Sidekick owners, but the loss was still significant.

While Microsoft is working on rectifying the situation, this misadventure shows the risks inherent to cloud computing as well as the importance of having a method of backing up data down on earth, away from the clouds.

While this incident should be taken as a clear warning and a chance to learn a valuable lesson (admittedly one that should have been obvious), the cloud does offer some interesting advantages. For example, having data in the cloud means that you can (in theory) access your data from almost anywhere and with a variety of devices. Of course, as this incident shows, being able to access your data is not very useful if your data has evaporated.

This, of course, leads to the old advice: back up your data and put not your faith in clouds. Also, avoid using a device that doesn’t let you back up your data yourself.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Cloud Computing is Dangerous (elasticvapor.com)
• With outage, Sidekick service loses its footing (news.cnet.com)
• How Did Danger Not Backup Its Servers? How Did Microsoft Allow Such A Failure? (techdirt.com)
• T-Mobile loses users’ data – shakes our trust in the cloud (downloadsquad.com)
• Microsoft server fails, Sidekick users lose their address book (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Sidekick outage casts cloud over Microsoft (news.cnet.com)
• Sidekick users see data in the cloud evaporate (inquisitr.com)