Lost in the Cloud: A Eulogy for My Lost Data

Sigh. Back in October, I was having a good old chuckle about T-Mobile and their data loss debacle. I mean the idea that a phone company lost all that customer data was crazy, but what about the folks who lost their data? Did they think to back it up to a computer or even write it down somewhere? The story eventually had a happy ending — sort of — with T-Mobile eventually recovering a majority of the lost data and giving Sidekick owners a $100 credit to those whose data was gone for good.

The obvious lesson was to back up your phone data, but look who has egg on their face now? I had to replace my Palm Pre last week because the keypad had stopped responding to my furtive presses on its soft gel keys. I think I might have tweeted or texted it to death. When the replacement came in, I ran to pick it up because folks, I NEED to tweet and text like my life depends on it.  The Sprint tech gave me the replacement and told me to enter the email address I had registered the phone under and like magic all my contacts and pertinent info would be restored like presto. Easy enough, after 10 minutes and a Gmail, Facebook, Linkedin, and Yahoo! sync all my contacts were restored…kinda.

To my chagrin and immediate frustration, I noticed that some of my info was missing, not a big chunk, but enough to grate on my nerves. And ever since the new phone’s arrival I keep receiving an error message that informs me that Sprint can not establish a data connection with my Pre, which sucks for me because I can’t send out email from my phone. I’ve called Sprint and dumped all my accounts…twice. I’m still getting the message. ARRRGH!! Sprint issued the following statement:

We are seeing a small number of customers who have experienced issues transferring their Palm Profile information to another Palm webOS device. Palm and Sprint are working closely together to support these customers to successfully transfer their information to the new device.

Apparently, I’m a part of the small few.

I just told you my harrowing tale to say this. Please make sure you backup all your phone contacts. I was lucky enough to get all of my mine back, but I did lose a draft to the book I’m working on along with some awesome pics of the fun I’ve been having as a Jersey girl in the city. Before we get all gung-ho on cloud computing and the companies that promise their customers that they’ll back up lost data for free, we need to take a look at their servers. What happens if the servers crash? Are they backed up somewhere or will be doomed to have another data loss fiasco? There’s another bee in my digital bonnet. Why in the world doesn’t Palm, T-Mobile and few other offenders, let users backup files to their computers without having to purchase third party software?

I’m not going to knock cloud computing completely because it’s allowing for collaborative efforts that were previously unheard of. And with Google beefing up its cloud computing to take on Microsoft, it’s obvious that its not going anywhere anytime soon. At this stage in the game, especially for mobile phone service providers, it might be a good idea to create an app that will do all the data restoration, similar to how iPhone users can back up their info on iTunes. Until then, if I were you, I’d be backing up all my precious contacts the old-fashioned way with a pad and a pen.