By Oo Gin Lee

THE unimaginable happened in the United States earlier this month, when about 800,000 users of the Danger Sidekick smartphone were told by their telco that they would likely lose all their contacts, photos, tasks, calendars and more.

The reason: a power cut on the servers hosting their personal data. The problem: there was no back-up.

The servers were managed by Danger Inc, which also makes the phones. Now, this is no fly-by-night company; it is a Microsoft subsidiary, acquired by the software giant last year.

I have no doubt that the much-touted My Phone service in the Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system released last week - which similarly lets you sync your Web mail, contacts, photos and calendar in your phone over-the-air on a server managed by Microsoft - was influenced by Danger.

Interestingly, in 2003, Danger's CEO and co-founder Andy Rubin left the company to form a new start-up called Android. Two years later, the latter was acquired by Google and the Google Android phone was born. Andy is now director of mobile development at Google.

To be sure, Danger's smartphones are not just devices. They are sold together with a subscription for users to synchronise their personal information and e-mail on the device.

Think of them as hosted BlackBerry services. In fact, StarHub was selling the Danger Hiptop for a couple of years in the mid-2000s. It was marketed as a consumer's alternative to the pricier BlackBerry.

Singaporeans were not directly affected by this outage, but for Netizens like me who keep so much of our personal information - Gmail, Google Contacts, Windows Live Messenger, Facebook, Google Docs - in the Internet "cloud", the thought of losing any of our personal data is terrifying.

Last week, Microsoft said that it had managed to restore users' contacts and was trying to get the other data back online. Experts are saying that Microsoft is probably trying to rebuild the data by stitching together data trails like piecing a jigsaw puzzle, which means there is no guarantee of success, unlike restoring data from a back-up copy.

The ability to synchronise your e-mail, contacts and calendar in your phone over-the-air in real time was one of the main reasons the corporate types went for the BlackBerry. It meant they could keep in touch with the office while they were outside.

But today, its pushmail is becoming common with the latest smartphones, notably the Google Android and Windows Mobile 6.5, which offer the same service to any consumer for free.

Free pushmail was the reason I finally went back to a smartphone, the HTC Hero Android phone, after years of using Sony Ericsson camera phones.

For consumers, this is the piece de resistance in phones.

We do not ask questions about where our data is stored, if the servers are sufficiently protected against fire hazards or if the country where the servers are located is earthquake-prone.

We assume that the service provider will take care of all the back-end stuff.

In fact, it is a given that service providers of Microsoft's stature would, at the very least, back up all of its customers' data.

Now that trust has been broken.

Unlike its near-monopoly of 90 per cent market share in the PC operating system business, Microsoft is fighting hard in the mobile space with Windows Mobile, which is only at No. 4 with about 10 per cent market share worldwide, after Symbian, BlackBerry and iPhone.

In my 10-year career as a tech journalist, I have written countless security tips asking consumers to back up their data and now with more urgency than before.

I will take no chances and export my contact list to a .csv file on my hard disk and, thank goodness, Gmail's Offline mode saves my e-mail to my local hard disk. I hope Microsoft learns from this power breakdown about the dangers of not backing up.

ginlee@sph.com.sg

This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life.

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