Good news for Sidekick users — Microsoft is restoring lost data. But the high-profile data loss and another involving Mac OS X Snow Leopard may leave Microsoft and Apple customers with a bad taste for some time. Microsoft reports it has recovered most, if not all, data for Sidekick customers whose personal information was affected by a weekend outage. Microsoft plans to begin restoring users’ data as soon as possible, starting with personal contacts, after the company validates the data and its restoration plan. Microsoft will then continue working around the clock to restore data to all affected users, including calendar, notes, tasks, photographs and high scores, as quickly as possible, according to Roz Ho, corporate vice president of premium mobile experiences for Microsoft. ‘Minority’ of Sidekick users affected “We now believe that data loss affected a minority of Sidekick users,” Ho said. “We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in

the core database and the backup. 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.” Ho said Microsoft will continue working closely with T-Mobile to restore user data as quickly as possible and is taking steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Microsoft has already made changes to improve the overall stability of the Sidekick service and initiated a more resilient backup process to ensure that the integrity of backups is maintained. Meanwhile, Apple is still grappling with data-loss issues of its own. On Oct. 12, Apple acknowledged a critical error in its new Mac OS X Snow Leopard that caused massive data loss for some users. The company insisted that the issue “occurs only in extremely rare cases” and it is…

Here is the original:
Data Losses May Make Microsoft, Apple Users Wary