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Microsoft says 'steady progress' continues in Sidekick data recovery

Microsoft officials promised last week to provide an update this weekend on its ongoing attempt to recover the customer data and information lost during its ongoing Sidekick outage. On October 18, the company provided that update, which didn't contain much new information.
Written by Mary Jo Foley, Senior Contributing Editor

Microsoft officials promised last week to provide an update this weekend on its ongoing attempt to recover the customer data and information lost during its ongoing Sidekick outage. On October 18, the company provided that update, which didn't contain much new information.

The Microsoft/Danger team apologized for the amount of time they are taking to restore contacts, photos, e-mail and other Sidekick services to which users lost access at the start of the month. The team said they were taking their time "to make sure we are doing everything possible to maintain the integrity of your data."

The team still is not committing to an exact recovery timetable, but is saying restoration should begin this week. From the October 18 update:

"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."

After telling users that they likely had lost all of their personal data, the Microsoft/Danger team then said they expected to be able to recover some of their data. Mid-weeklast week, they said they expected to recover "most if not all" of the missing user data.

Microsoft officials still have not provided many details about what caused the outage, other than to say it was a core system failure. The failure is unrelated to Microsoft's cloud infrastructure and/or Microsoft's Azure datacenters, as the company has continued to run the Sidekick back-end on the same infrastructure it has been running on before Microsoft acquired the company in 2008.

A number of members of the Sidekick team Microsoft acquired have been working on Microsoft's Pink premium mobile services and phones for the past year.

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