When all data for Sidekicks got lost recently [read this article in the Wall Street Journal] was it a cloud failure or was it a single system failure?[1] [also New York Times article]
In the sense that data was being stored somewhere and the customer didn’t know where it was, then yes it was a cloud failure. But I contend that it was also a failure caused by the existence of a single-point-of-failure. (As system developers, this is our constant nightmare.) The product/service was set up to use a single data service with (apparently) inadequate backup. That created the possibility of this single-point-of-failure. The real failure was that T-Mobile didn’t provide the option to back up your data in a location under your control, so that you could later on restore it if the central service went down.
When I was working at Leapfrog to construct systems that would support “online” toys that would get and store data in the cloud (yes, in 2000 we were doing that too), we considered these same possibilities. We had not only a distributed Oracle database running on more than one computer, but we were streaming our data out to a backup in “real time” so we could reconstruct the data if something nasty happened. And once before we launched we had to take advantage of this when a database administrator‘s fingers slipped and he destroyed the data in a critical part of the database. These were multi-gigabyte databases that would have taken a long time to restore. We really didn’t want to lose them!
That’s why I still purchase CDs before uploading them to my iPod. At least mostly. The few albums I purchase and download, I always write off to CDs for safekeeping. When considering purchasing any system – computer or smartphone – consider how you’re going to back up your data, and maybe in more places than just one.
[1] What happened? T-Mobile Sidekick users were treated last week to all of their data, calendars and photos getting lost. T-Mobile contracted with Microsoft for a server-based service that stored critical data for the Sidekicks and then made it available to the devices. When a Sidekick was powered down, none of the data was retained in the device – it all lived on the Microsoft-provided service. When the service went down, losing data, any Sidekick that got powered down would never be able to recover the data. [The Sidekick photo is from the T-M0bile web site.]
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