When T-Mobile/SideKick recently lost all their customer data, at least based on what is published in leading technology blogs at GigaOm and Techcrunch, there is little chance of getting the data back. This shows the holes in the cloud strategy and proves that not all clouds are created equal, and some are outright incompetent.
Our sister service, IBackup specializes in highly scalable backup solutions, for almost every platform including Linux, Windows and Mac. An online backup implementation of this critical SideKick data or database(s) to IBackup that can easily scale to multiple terabytes would have prevented such a disaster.
In addition, with the Hot Sites solution option available for IBackup, they could have had a replicated data at another site where you could set up an alternate site in the event of primary site failure in a matter of few minutes or hours.
This T-Mobile/SideKick case showcases how a bad disaster recovery plan can ruin a good running cloud implementation.
