Is your data in danger?

Oct 12

Technology , Comments

Over the past week many T-Mobile customers who use the Sidekick have been experiencing data outage issues. The problems came to a head this weekend, when T-Mobile announced that some customers may have experienced a permanent loss of data, including “pictures, contacts, e-mails, text messages, calendar entries, and to-do lists.” The data was held on servers maintained by Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft. MIcrosoft and T-Mobile did not issue any additional press releases today, as they spent their time feverishly trying to recover data and respond to customer requests.

Though I’m not a T-Mobile customer, this episode did make me think about how much of my information I trust to the cloud. The advent of cloud computing has promised a new standard of data reliability and integrity, 100% uptime. But are we naive to think that this guarantee gives us license to never backup our information?

I’ve got data on Gmail, Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, Yahoo, Hotmail and other services that I trust will last indefinitely. Backing up my information from these services isn’t encouraged, nor is it even convenient. As we transition from traditional servers to cloud-based redundancy, there are bound to be some hiccups along the way. My only suggestion at this point is to keep multiple copies of your most important files, and hope Gmail doesn’t go down for more than the few hours that it does occasionally.

More information on the Sidekick situation can be found at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10372921-56.html