Microsoft has announced the restoration of Sidekick users’ contacts as the first milestone in recovering data it lost in the cloud computing disaster affecting its Danger subsidiary, while a new source explains why the restoration was possible without a backup and why it is taking so long.

A source familiar with Sun SAN hardware used in the Danger datacenter has provided AppleInsider with additional insight explaining why it is taking Microsoft weeks to recover its users’ lost data after initial reports stated that the data was completely lost and that no suitable backup existed.

Microsoft’s problems began at the beginning of the month, when the cloud servers its operates under contract to T-Mobile began falling offline. It was initially announced that large amounts of T-Mobile’s Sidekick subscribers’ data had been lost and that no backup existed for the user data, which was stored entirely on Microsoft’s servers. (Sidekick devices are not designed to backed up locally in the same way the iPhone backs itself up to iTunes on the user’s desktop computer.)

On October 6, T-Mobile issued a statement saying, “Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger.”

On October 15, two weeks after the problems began, Roz Ho, Microsoft’s vice president of Premium Mobile Experiences, issued an apology for the outage and announced that the company had determined that, contrary to initial reports that all the data was permanently lost, the company now thought that it should actually be able to recover most of the data that had been lost, but that the recovery effort would take some time.
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