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October 14, 2009

2009: The year your data died

Data disasters at Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook all in the same week mean one thing: Your data -- and the Net itself -- are a lot more fragile than you may think

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For a while there it looked like 2009 would be remembered as the Year of the Dead Celebrity. But Michael, Farrah, Walter, Ed, and all the rest may have to move over. This is rapidly becoming the Year the Data Died.

Exhibit A, of course, is the T-Mobile Sidekick Debacle, with Microsoft subsidiary Danger in the key role as the clueless initiator of disaster. ("Gee, I wonder what pushing this button will do...") They screwed the pooch in a half-dozen ways, starting with a weeklong outage that went completely unacknowledged until Sidekick users started kicking up a fuss in forums and the media picked up on it.

[ Also on InfoWorld: "Microsoft screwup puts T-Mobile users in Danger" | Stay up to date on Robert X. Cringely's musings and observations with InfoWorld's Notes from the Underground newsletter. ]

Then it took them another few days to warn users to not reboot their Sidekicks (which is the first thing you're told to do when something isn't working right) because that would wipe out their data. Then the announcement last weekend the data was lost forever, followed by another announcement that maybe some of the data wouldn't be lost forever.

T-Mobile -- which appears to be mostly blameless in this scenario, yet is getting a ton of heat for it -- reacted by offering free data service for October, a $100 credit, and a halt to new Sidekick sales, and reportedly is letting people out of their contracts without penalty. No matter; its reputation is still toast.

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MAS 14-Oct-09 10:21am
Without being able to easily backup your own data (or ensure that someone else has successfully done this) it's all just a house of cards.

It's really a shame that something this fundamental to IT is still such a problem in 2009.

Repent all ye sinners, the Digital Dark Ages is nigh!

vilain 14-Oct-09 11:08am
A couple years ago, an acquaintance talked to DANGER about their data center (this was pre-launch). They had no disaster recovery plan to speak of and had never tested if they could recover data from a server failure. Then they went public and were eventually bought by Microsoft. Maybe whomever vetted the company missed this little problem if it still existed. Seems like it might have. "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity"
rps 14-Oct-09 1:09pm
1 reply
Yea, sure I am going to put my company's valuable data "in the cloud" Back it up stupid. If it important enough to save, it might be important enough to make a backup of. My $0.02 worth.
tomaddox 14-Oct-09 1:27pm
1 reply
Indeed. I wonder if Infoworld's cloud computing column will contain any mention of this outage. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess a) not or b) that it will somehow be proof that we really should keep everything in the cloud.
ctryon 15-Oct-09 7:25am
1 reply
Remember that, just because you run local servers, and back up your data, that doesn't make you immune to outages and data loss. True, this has been a REALLY bad year for the Cloud, but I still think that it's a lot like airline safety: Your chance of being killed in an automobile accident are hundreds of times greater than your chance of being killed in an airline accident, but many people still think driving in a car is safer, mostly because of the ILLUSION of being in control of their own destiny, and because, when a passenger airplane goes down, everyone hears about it.

I still agree that providers of Cloud services have a long way to go before they can honestly make those kinds of security and reliability claims, but I have no doubt that, in a few years, it's going to be a lot safer to store your data in the cloud than it will be on your local server or backup system.
Gray_Hair 15-Oct-09 12:01pm
It is not about probability it is about RECOURSE. I can test and verify my own backups and infrastructure. I cannot test and verify external resources. Back up early, back up often, and never skip a scheduled validation restore.
rodolico 15-Oct-09 6:49am
1 reply
Cringe, you keep saying T-Mobile is "mostly blameless." I disagree. I am a T-Mobile customer, and one of the minor irritants is that they provide no way to save your backup locally. They have a great facility to save your phone book to their server, and you can log in and manage your phone book through their web interface, but there is no way to then download that as a CSV or anything. They have gone to great lengths to keep you from doing it (I tried to do some screen scrapes, and some direct calls with wget). I finally gave up and just back up my phone book on my laptop; deleting all the entries in their "tool." I am a long time T-Mobile customer, and am very, very pleased with the service. But, they have gone to great lengths to make it where your data is not yours, it is theirs. Thus, they share a lot of the blame.
Gray_Hair 15-Oct-09 12:04pm
A lesson well learned from M$FT, own the data - own the user...

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