Not sure if you guys heard about this...

One of our cell phone providers in the US (the smallest, national one) is T-mobile, and they have a phone called the Sidekick that stores all its persistent user data on 'the cloud'.

Well, recently everyone's crap was lost... all of it. Poof...gone.

As it turns out, Microsoft appears to have purchased the company doing the cloud stuff (Danger Inc) and staffed them down too much to handle a schedule hardware upgrade. so the upgrade was outsourced to Hitachi. Apparently no one did any backups before trying the upgrade and the upgrade bombed, thereby wiping everyone's shit out.

Obviously there are multiple failure points here, but when you store your contacts or whatever on your phone, it's your responsibility to back the crap up. When it's stored centrally, you no longer have any control. And whereas you can kill your own stored info, a centralized location will kill ALL info. tsk tsk

Chances are there will be numerous lawsuits materializing over this one. And, really, it's completely inexcusable.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... atsNewsTop
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10368709-56.html

Atleast it is the first step towards something better. I guess the expression "chaos is the source of evolution" is not too much off here.