Sidekick data saved: Microsoft said it has recovered majority of personal information

Microsoft Corp. has said it has recovered “most, if not all” customer data thought to have been lost when its servers hosting information for T-Mobile USA Inc.’s Sidekick devices crashed last week.
Microsoft owns the Sidekick software provider Danger Inc.
“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,” said Roz Ho, corporate VP of Premium Mobile Experiences at Microsoft, in a letter to Sidekick users. “We will then continue to work around the clock to restore data to all affected users, including calendar, notes, tasks, photographs and high scores, as quickly as possible.”
Ho added that the outage was related to 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. This careful process has taken a significant amount of time, but was necessary to preserve the integrity of the data.”
The outage prevented Sidekick users from being able to access data services from their device as well as the ability to restore personal information stored on the servers back to their phone. T-Mobile USA had initially warned users to not power down their devices as this could lead to the deletion of their personal information on the device and no information saved to restore that data. The carrier has offered Sidekick users a free month of data service as well as a $100 “customer appreciation card” for the trouble.
The Sidekick devices remain “temporarily out of stock” on T-Mobile USA’s Web site.