If you're one of the unfortunate few SideKick owners who lost personal data when the huge Microsoft server farm hiccupped recently fate may be smiling on you. As per T-Mobile Forums:

Beginning [10/20/09], log into the My.T-Mobile website, where there will be a recovery tool to restore contacts you may have lost during the recent service outage. This tool will enable you to view the contacts you had on your device as of October 1.

Here's what Microsoft says, in a press release from earlier this month. It's a sad situation but one that we can all learn from: Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Everyone of these poor folks should have been doing local backups as well as counting on M$.   This goes for all of us and for all forms of electronic storage - if it's important back it up AND archive it.

Backups and Archives
There are two actions here with slight differences.

"Backing Up" something typically means having it available in case of a complete loss. Backups are typically overwritten with new data as it changes. A backup lets you reload all of your data when something fails, like a hard disk.

"Archiving" something means having various versions of those backups - these are backups that you save forever. An archive lets you go back and grab an earlier edit of something or an item you've deleted. People often make "snapshots" of their data once a month (whatever period is prudent for their work) and keep it offsite, maybe in a safe deposit box or at Iron Mountain. People who do backups by rotating a set up takes over the period of a month or so typically rotate OUT one of those tapes. It goes to the permanent storage location and a new tape replaces it. This also ensures that, over a year or so, all tapes get replaced with new ones.

Offsite Backups
With today's more ubiquitous high-speed Internet connections, offsite storage has become a popular way of backing up and archiving. Companies like Carbonite and Mozy provide a simple "client" (program) that sends copies of your files, over the Internet, at predifined intervals (or whenever changed). The up sides to this are:

• You can access these files from anywhere in the world that has Internet access. Your laptop lost it in Lisbon? Buy a new one and then download all your saved files - this CAN take days.
• When "THE BIG ONE" hits, the backups you wrote to DVD and stored at your Mom's house may be just as useless as your PC. These offsite organizations reduce this risk by storing your data at geographically dispersed locations
• Media-based backups (tapes, DVD, Flash Drives) removed from the premises can be lost and STOLEN. Just ask the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and the Identity Theft Resource Center about "breaches" that occur when a tape, containing millions of social security numbers, is stolen from someone's car while being transported. The better Offsite services encrypt your data before it leaves your PC and is stored encrypted. Only you, by keeping a special code someplace safe, can access your data. Even the Offsite people can't help you if you lose this code.

The down side is simply TIME. You've got gigbytes of data and megabits of speed. Typically, when they first sign up for it, a business using a service like this must let all their data get sent to the service over a weekend or longer. Once it's up-to-date, only the changes to the data are sent which takes much less bandwidth and time.

Storage Devices
For businesses, companies like SonicWALL make appliances that do backups locally to a hard drive (so that people can have access to deleted files and for quick repair of damaged hard drives) AND send a customer-specified fraction of that data offsite (typically, stuff they could not live without if THE WORST happened, like accounting files, HR records, order data, etc).

Even a simple flash drive, an external USB/Firewire hard drive or a Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive can at least provide backups of your files and even versions of them, if not the bennies of offsite storage. NAS is like an external drive except that it connects over your local ethernet or WiFi LAN. And since it's networked, every PC in your home or small office can use it. If you're tech savvy, you can create a simple NAS machine by using an old PC to run Windows, MacOS, or Linux - just stick it someplace out of the way and let it collect files.

It's a Cinch to Synch
I work from home. I am connected to a Windows server across the Internet. I store many of my files, including My Documents on that server. I also use Windows' Sync Manager to  make them available to me when the Internet is down or when I switch to my laptop. Every time a file syncs to the server, an invisible copy is stored on my PC. If my Internet connection (or even the remote server) fails, I can use and even edit the "offline copy". Once it comes back up, Windows knows to update the server version with any changes made in the interim. If I edited the file on my laptop, the server will get this new version as will my PC. Since the originals are stored away from my home on this server, it counts as an offsite backup as well as a way to synchronize between multiple machines.

Major online presences like Google allow you to store files there. You can use free Google Docs to store files so you have backups and so they're available to you virtually anyplace. The downside is that you have to upload and maintain these files manually and they aren't encrypted.