Now, one truth that has always been self evident; a company doesn’t have to deal with MMOs to give the industry something to learn from. Such is the case with Microsoft, Danger Inc (Yes, that is the company name), T-Mobile, and a certain mobile phone called the Sidekick. For those of you living under a rock, the Sidekick was introduced in 2003 with a great feature: Everything you did on the device was immediately backed up on their internal servers. Add a contact? Backed up. Delete a contact? Backed up. Send an alcohol inspired text message? Sadly, backed up. When you turn off the phone, everything on your phone is deleted so it can be properly synced when you next boot up.
The sidekick is something akin to the mobile phone of MMOs, where equally everything you do is backed up on internal servers rather than your own computer. Because crucial information is stored on the company’s servers rather than a person’s computer, or phone, it becomes imperative for that company to have backups available in case something were to go awry. Jagex, for example, does a backup of its systems on Runescape every fifteen minutes, just in case there’s a major server crash and a rollback is needed. Even then, a critical crash earlier last month resulted in several days of data loss on the friends list server.
So here we are in October: T-Mobile’s service went down around the start of the month, much to the dismay of its users. After several days of no service, Sidekick users reported information missing. As it turned out, there were some critical errors on Microsoft’s end where the servers were stored. The personal information synced by the Sidekicks was lost, with no usable backups available. Effectively, all personal data on every T-mobile device is gone. The only way, currently, to keep your data from being lost is to keep your phone on at all times until the service is fully restored.
There are currently two lawsuits running over this issue. Sidekick users can expect a compensation of a $100 gift certificate and a free month of service.
MMO Fallout 