Harman's Room

To provide you with background on this story, I will link you to coverage of what is potentially the largest consumer data loss ever from both Engadget and T-Mobile (TMo). In short, what seems to be a large number of users of any Sidekick, who have, from my understanding, been without reliable service or access to any of their data in over a week are now being told that their data is almost certainly gone forever due to server failure at Danger, the company who manages the software side of the devices which are still made my Sharp (save for the Slide, made by Motorola). I’m going to try as best I can to ignore the fact for as long as possible that Danger is now owned by Microsoft and that this never happened before said acquisition.

I will call out Perez Hilton for a number of reasons, namely the fact that his website, twitter feed, and poor (immature) drawings composed, I assume, in MSPaint bother me to no end. He lost a ton of contacts and data, which is a travesty, but totally avoidable. My main issue is that he then proceeded to bitch about it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t totally disagree with him (as TMo should actually be giving users a refund for time without their data as well as making cutting ties with the company in whom I know I could never trust again with my money, let alone data) but I don’t agree with John Mayer, either (because those are as easy to lose as any data). I think my real problem with his whining was his reason for not backing up his data:

PS T-Mobile used to tell Sidekick users they personally didn’t need to back up their data. They did it for us. That’s why I never did. :-(

Really? That’s your reason? The ejaculatory-mouthed drawings make a lot more sense now: you’re just not an intelligent human being.

So there are a numerous points of failure in the Sidekick Data System. Perez is not the first Hilton to have a data problem with their Sidekick (warning, Nudity) since a simple password protects all that data, and people do not know how to make a password to save their lives as we all know. Another is that, while most GSM phones either default to storing numbers on the SIM cards which grant cellular service to the device, Sidekicks default the data to the device itself, and migration is not made simple. There is no “move…” or even “copy all data to SIM Card” option. There is an option users can set to store their contacts on the SIM card when added, but I do not believe this will migrate existing contacts over (if anyone has a sidekick and wishes to correct me, please feel free). I have not used a sidekick since November 1, 2007 but users from “my day” likely would have had their contacts stored on their devices already and not made the switch. And then, perhaps, the largest point of Failure in the whole system: no backups?

The true test of a backup system is what happens in the case of total data loss. I use Mac OS X’s built in Time Machine to backup data to an external drive. You can bet that if that drive failed, I would overnight a Seagate Barracuda to replace it at nearly any cost and backup my data again the next day. But if someone stole my iMac what would stop them from taking the little hard drive right next to it? This is a problem I don’t have themoney to solve, but when I upgrade my external from the 750GB I am currently using, to something a little more spacey (either a Seagate 2TB or a Drobo) I will surely do it. The plan is to backup my machine onto two drives, and keep one offsite (preferrably) or at least somewhere other than right next to my machine (another room, closet, in a drawer, etc.). Backups are great if your computer dies of natural causes. If my computer were consumed in a fire, what’s to say the data would be okay on my external?

You’ll notice something here: no one had to tell me that my data would be okay. Seagate tells me their drives have a five-year warranty, so they expect them to last for at least five years. Apple tells me that using Time Machine is all I need to keep things backed up. Common sense tells me that one set of backups should be enough but if you’re actually relying on your data that much, you really can’t be too safe. I personally cannot rebuild my 11k Music Library: there are too many bootlegs I taped, and too much time spent organizing it. Photos are traditionally harder to replace as music can be reobtained through ripping, downloading, etc. whereas photos are usually just your own, though you might have them somewhere. Documents, again, are very personal and not distributed. But to me, those things are small losses compared to my music library. Unfortunately for me, the priceless data in question weighs in at about 60GB. Pretty substantial amount of data to backup, as versus what Perez had: some pictures, and 2000 address book contacts. How much data is 2000 contacts?

Alexander William Bradley
x-(xxx)-xxx-xxxx
someemailaddress@gmail.com

I even gave him the benefit of the doubt and included a country code, and think my name is pretty long. 25 characters for my name. 15 for a properly formatted phone number. Regardless of the length of my email addresses, again, benefit of the doubt, I’ll throw in 50 characters for an email, to be safe. That means a name, number and email is 90 bytes, which makes an entire phone book a whopping 180k worth of data. Even if you printed your phone book as a PDF (something I did before leaving TMo and periodically throughout my year of little to no service most everywhere) the file should have been small enough to email. He could have likely exported to a CSV file and imported it into something useful (Google Contact Manager, I’m looking at you).

The point is that there is no excuse for not backing up data seen as this precious, but people do it all the time. It is frustrating as a technologist to have someone rely on me to bail out a dinghy with a paper cup, when I usually don’t even need to ask if they have life-vests: it’s just assumed that the computer will be okay and they don’t need to worry, but they don’t have backups if they’re wrong (and they usually are). I am not proposing a foolproof solution here, but have a few ideas and things I actively do:

1. MobileMe iDisk – While I primarily use the service for syncing small bits of data across machines, it’s nice to know that this data is backed up somewhere, including my address book (which syncs with my phone). iDisk gives you 20GB of space and syncs pretty seamlessly through a mounted drive on your Mac.
2. Time Machine – Again, Mac specific, but, if you have Leopard or Snow Leopard and are not using Time Machine, you’re out of your mind. A free utility I have been able to use countless times for contacts alone, this takes the guesswork out of creating backups. The last time my father’s Mac Mini gave him some troubles, I went and bought one for him. “Merry Christmas,” I said. “Your data’s safe now!” — This was in September, by the way.
3. Dropbox – I have sung its praises before, but this thing’s the real deal. Imagine a 2GB Flash Drive you can’t lose that is on you no matter where you are so as long as you have the internet. It can also sync to numerous computers. I have it on four machines, so if they ever lose my data, unless they go crazy and start erasing data on your machines, my data’s safe in at least one location. Even if it wasn’t, Time Machine is backing up that data on one machine, and two are laptops, so I could just turn off wireless and grab my files (Yes, I have considered the possibility of a full Data Loss by Dropbox and syncing ‘nothing’ down to my machine. I’m paranoid).

I hope this information helps and teaches some people. This is serious stuff, guys. Don’t pull a Perez (or just don’t use Microsoft Products). I wonder if people thinking about using a Web Based, In-The-Cloud Office are watching this and making a mental note that Microsoft is not necessarily the best place to store all your files…