T-Mobile Is Fail

T-Mobile, in all its supreme horribleness, has managed to lose all backed-up data from their customers' Sidekick smartphones. All of it. T-Mo is blaming Microsoft/Danger (the company responsible for the server hardware) for letting the servers fail, but nobody on T-mobile's customer list really cares whose fault it is. Bloggers around the 'sphere have been calling for the fall of cloud-based data storage, due to its obviously unreliable service, and people are now finally listening to the paranoid claims. While I feel for the victims of the T-Mobile Data Loss Tragedy (hitherto called "10/13"), and my heart really does go out to the family and friends of the victims, this is not the time or place to rail against cloud data storage.

Firstly of all, geeks around the Interwebs are still scratching their collective heads. How on digital Earth could a reputable company screw up basic backup practices so flagrantly. Even the smallest IT shop in the tiniest company (protip: not Microdoft/danger) knows that you have bakcups, busckups of backups, and then you have off-site backups of sensitive, mission-critical information (nuclear missile codes is a prime example) just in case of an ICBM strike from North Korea. For many companies, it has become harder to get rid of data than it is to keep it, as many federal law breakers have come to realize. If anything, Microsoft/Danger should have had at least something to show for their presumed basic backup competence. But no, they can't recover a single phone number for a single customer. It's all gone. Do you now realize how insanely ludicrous and suspicious this all is? Some have suggested that there was a corruption in one of the databases that spread silently, so even the backups got infected. That claim still holds no water (it sunk about an hour ago) because they should have had incremental historic backups that should have all the data from before the current database went down. The only plausible theory thus far is that the conglomeration of the Soviets and aliens from Mars hacked into the mainframe a la every episode of 24, and totally uploaded a virus all up in there.

My point is that this is an anomaly. This is by no means a normal data loss situation and should not be treated as the norm. It's very much like saying "My hard drive failed. DOWN WITH LOCAL STORAGE!!" Everything fails. Especially hardware. That's why G-d created automated system backups. If Microsoft/Danger is especially evil when it comes to backing up their customers' data, it's your fault for giving your data to a company with the word "DANGER" in its name. Someone in marketing needs to be fired for that naming fail. But seriously, just because one company is seriously compromised enough that every backup of the data is gone, then that company needs to go away. You can't cry about the failure of the cloud every time there's data loss. There's no such thing as a perfect system (except for mine), and the Interwebs are no different. If  storing your data in the cloud is cheaper, more efficient, and viable from an IT infrastructure standpoint, there's no reason you can't do some proper research and find a company that is reliable enough not totally screw you over.