T-Mobile is pleased to announce that Calendar, To Do Lists, and Notes are now available for restoration on My T-Mobile. Microsoft/Danger continue to work on settings and photo restoration. We hope to have these available for our customers very soon.
We are happy to report that many of our Sidekick customers have successfully restored their contacts back to their device. If you haven’t done so already, we encourage you to visit My T-Mobile to restore your contacts. There was a very small group of customers for whom we were unable to recover any contacts. Those customers have been notified by mail to their T-Mobile billing address. If you have been unable to recover your lost contacts and you did not receive a notice in the mail from T-Mobile, we encourage you to contact Customer Care by dialing 611 on your device.
The Microsoft / Danger team continues to work on restoring the rest of customer data, including Calendars, To Do Lists, Notes, Settings, High Scores, and Pictures. We will share more details around this restoration process very soon.
If you haven’t already received it, you will soon be seeing a software update becoming available on your device. You will not notice any changes to your device as a result of this update, but after receiving the update, all Catalog application data will now be more securely backed up in the Microsoft / Danger systems.
10/20/2009 Update:
Microsoft Update on Sidekick Data Restoration
The Danger / Microsoft team continues to work around the clock and has completed its latest round of rigorous tests. We are now ready to make the first phase of the content restoration process available to you, starting with personal contacts.
This data restoration effort is only necessary for the minority of customers who lost data from their Sidekick devices.
Beginning today, log into the My T-Mobile website, where there will be a recovery tool to restore contacts you may have lost during the recent service outage. This tool will enable you to view the contacts you had on your device as of October 1. With a few clicks and a confirmation, you will be able to restore these contacts to your Sidekick. If you have recreated some of the same contacts on your Sidekick since October 1, you can choose to keep both sets of contacts, merge them, or just keep the set of contacts now on your device. You may also edit any partial or complete duplicates on your Sidekick after restoration.
We continue to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to restore your data. We’re making solid progress on the next phase in this restoration process, including your photographs, notes, to-do lists, marketplace data and high scores.
We appreciate your ongoing patience.
10/18/2009 Update:
Microsoft Update on Sidekick Data Restoration
The Danger / Microsoft team is continuing to work around the clock on the data restoration process. We apologize that this is taking so long, but we want to make sure we are doing everything possible to maintain the integrity of your data.
We continue to make steady progress, and we hope to be able to begin restoring personal contacts for affected users this week, with the remainder of the content (photographs, notes, to-do-lists, marketplace data, and high scores) shortly thereafter.
This data restoration effort is only necessary for customers who lost data from their Sidekick devices. We appreciate your ongoing patience.
10/17/2009 Update:
Microsoft Update on Sidekick Data Restoration
The Danger / Microsoft team has continued to work around the clock and is conducting its last round of rigorous tests before making the restoration process available to you. We’re making solid progress in restoring content and will update you tomorrow with additional timing and instructions for recovery.
This data restoration effort is only necessary for customers who lost data from their Sidekick devices. We appreciate your ongoing patience.
10/15/2009 Update:
Microsoft Confirms Data Recovery for Sidekick Users
Data Restoration to Begin as Soon as Possible for Affected Customers
Dear T-Mobile Sidekick customers,
On behalf of Microsoft, I want to apologize for the recent problems with the Sidekick service and give you an update on the steps we have taken to resolve these problems.
We are pleased to report that we have recovered most, if not all, customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage. We plan to begin restoring users’ personal data as soon as possible, starting with personal contacts, after we have validated the data and our restoration plan. We will then continue to work around the clock to restore data to all affected users, including calendar, notes, tasks, photographs and high scores, as quickly as possible.
We now believe that data loss affected a minority of Sidekick users. If your Sidekick account was among those affected, please continue to log into these forums for the latest updates about when data restoration will begin, and any steps you may need to take. We will work with T-Mobile to post the next update on data restoration timing no later than Saturday.
We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up. We rebuilt the system component by component, recovering data along the way. This careful process has taken a significant amount of time, but was necessary to preserve the integrity of the data.
We will continue working closely with T-Mobile to restore user data as quickly as possible. We are eager to deliver the level of reliable service that our incredibly loyal customers have become accustomed to, and we are taking immediate steps to help ensure this does not happen again. Specifically, we have made changes to improve the overall stability of the Sidekick Service and initiated a more resilient backup process to ensure that the integrity of our database backups is maintained.
Once again, we apologize for this situation and the inconvenience that it has created. Please know that we are working all-out to resolve this situation and restore the reliability of the service.
Sincerely,
Roz Ho
Corporate Vice President
Premium Mobile Experiences, Microsoft Corporation
