T-Mobile may be able to recover much of the data lost during last week's Sidekick debacle, the company has announced.
But it may be too late to prevent the damage to the image of the nascent cloud computing industry, an analyst warned.
Microsoft has informed T-Mobile that a large portion of the information lost when the server hosting the data for the roughly 1 million sidekick users crashed will probably be recoverable, the New York Times said. Microsoft engineers had first warned that the data was likely to be gone forever.
The servers, operated by Microsoft subsidiary Danger, did not have a backup. The cloud-based Sidekick handset relies on cloud storage for customers’ photos, calendar apps and other personal data.
Neither Microsoft nor Danger has given any public explanation for the crash or loss of data.
T-Mobile said it would credit customers whose data cannot be restored with $100, provided they experienced a significant loss of data.
But the disaster remains a black eye for T-Mobile, Microsoft and the cloud computing industry, Forward Concepts analyst Will Strauss told the BBC.
T-Mobile has halted sales of the Sidekick handset, and Microsoft will have to work hard to convince the public that cloud computing remains a viable technology in the wake of the bad publicity, he said.
Technologizer editor Harry McCracken added that the public will start seeking assurances that such large-scale loss of data will not re-occur.