There's a saying that gamblers will trust everybody, but they still cut the cards. No matter what the other side says, you should never rely on them. As the mobile world is moving towards a “cloud computing” solution for storage and access, the problems of Microsoft and the Danger/Sidekick product are a salient warning to back up your data or risk it being lost forever through no fault of your own.
Read on in the full article.
Hands up everyone who's synced their phones with an empty Outlook database only to discover that they have completely wiped their contacts from their phones.
> And with the might of Microsoft behind the device, it's not like anything bad would happen to your data.
I sincerely hope you're being sarcastic. You truly can't be serious can you? Have you actually heard of Microsoft before?
People need to get over this insane idea of "any criticism of Microsoft is just anti-MS bias, how could they be so successful if they were rubbish?"
MS have been criticised for 30 years BECAUSE THEY WRITE TRULY TERRIBLY ENGINEERED SOFTWARE (and services).
I've followed closely MS for over 20 years, have been a software engineer for 25, and am just astounded that anyone anywhere who has even the slightest clue about IT, could even begin to trust an MS product.
Yeah, this is an anti-MS rant. But a fully justified one. They can't even be trusted with data that is live on your device now, let alone backed up stuff - i.e. as a computer or phone is actually running, it could just die, and lose your live data - an unimaginable number of crashes for hundreds of millions of users over 3 decades, has proven that MS are the most incompetant software makers in history. How are they so big and successful? A superb marketing dept. and numerous questionable business practices many of which have proven illegal. Why do people find it difficult to connect their success with for example the EU handing them the largest fine ever given out?
Honestly, people who should know better and still use MS, deserve to use MS, with all the implications. I just pity the millions of poor users who don't know better.
Yes, Ewan was being sarcastic. Trust me!
The weakest point of S60 v 3 FP1 (E90) , there is no option to Backup Calendar to MemoryCard , or run Calendar on MC - like messaging . Only contacts can be Backup-ped . I wonder allready several years why ? While S80 could have as many calendars backups as you like on MC (9210)
😊 Regards jApi NL
MS was silly to buy Danger. The Sidekick is the stupidest "smartphone" platform ever created, designed purely to give corporations control over user data. It is hardly surprising that this has happened. I do not feel the slightest pity to Sidekick users who has lost years of data. What kind of moron would pay for a phone that does not have its own internal flash memory to store data? Or does not come with ActiveSync/PC Suite-like PC-mobile sync software?
FYI, the guy who created the Sidekick went on to create Android, another champion for so called 'cloud' computing. Sorry, but I will not trust my data with any large corporation, especially evil google.
I can understand why people got bitten by the sidekick failure and am sorry for their problems.
But when talking about S60/iPhone I'm a bit confused to this whole discussion.
I never even dreamt of viewing a phone as a source of data. My contacts/calendear comes from my computing environment, and gets _synced_ to the phone - sure sometimes I add some info on the handset, but that will regulary go back to my computing environment on the next sync.
In my case MacBook and N97 I just use missing sync (works but you have to sync twice to get arround a stupid bug in missing sync+n97), but regardless of what os/environment you use there should always be some way of syncing your handset, if nothing else you can always sync with Ovi or Google, personaly I would see them as last alternatives, but thats just my opinion.
Anyhow if you never ever view your phone as a source and single container of a given data, integrity should be solved with the normal backoup routines for whatever computing environment you use.
In my case the only app giving me a slight issue is Handy Safe, witch I muse use vmware to sync since it seems to be windows only on the pc side.
Same goes with the iPhone, since your computer is the main carrier of the data backups are handled in that end of the pairing.
Always backup to your computer, a remote location and your memory-card (if possible)
That's my motto and it has helped me recover data a number of times in the past 20 years.
Kim
Unregistered wrote:
I've followed closely MS for over 20 years, have been a software engineer for 25, and am just astounded that anyone anywhere who has even the slightest clue about IT, could even begin to trust an MS product.
I trust it in the enterprise and it's never let me down. I would be quite happy to use an alternative but there isn't one that wouldn't cost me dearly. And if you want the discussion, bring it on. Many have tried to convince me and failed. I would be only to pleased to save some cash, but there isn't any way I could.
Me too. I have been using MS desktop products for over twenty years and it has never let me down, both in corporate environment as well as for personal use. If it works, then fine. I do not care about the inner politics and whatever.
Obviously as far as phones are concern, I am a Symbian user, but for PC I am more than happy to stick by MS.
I've seen Steve recommend to backup within the phone to the mem-card quite a few times, but I never understood what would be the point of that? Unless ofcourse you have no other backup at all, but that would be a different problem...
If you lose the phone, you also have lost the mem-card in it, so now the thief has two copies of your data, and the mem-card copy of it isnt even pin-code protected...
When replacing phones - who would bother to keep the old mem-card?? Prices go down and sizes go up so fast that a one year old mem-card has close to zero value, not worth the effort to bother to take it out of the old phone. Simpler to just format it and include it when you sell/give away the old handset, if you are paranoid you could always throw it away.
jaclu wrote:I've seen Steve recommend to backup within the phone to the mem-card quite a few times, but I never understood what would be the point of that? Unless ofcourse you have no other backup at all, but that would be a different problem...If you lose the phone, you also have lost the mem-card in it, so now the thief has two copies of your data, and the mem-card copy of it isnt even pin-code protected...
That's why my friend, we move the newly created backup directory from memory card to PC, and install remote locking + remote data wiping software.
GeceBekcisi wrote:That's why my friend, we move the newly created backup directory from memory card to PC, and install remote locking + remote data wiping software.
Sorry, but the first part just didnt make much sense to me, if you have a PC that can comunicate with the phone, wouldnt it be easier to just sync and/or backup to the PC directly?
First doing an in-phone backup to mem-card then syncing that to a PC seems to be a redundant extra step...
I agree on the remote lock and wipe as sound practice, but in my case I wouldn't bother, since my buisness data isn't realy of any value to competitors, or rather I dont have much of competition in my vertical field.
I'm not questioning backups/syncs, more the value of in-device backups, since the fate of the mem-card is usualy the same as for the device.
I'm not questioning backups/syncs, more the value of in-device backups, since the fate of the mem-card is usualy the same as for the device.
Unregistered wrote:>
Honestly, people who should know better and still use MS, deserve to use MS, with all the implications. I just pity the millions of poor users who don't know better.
Yes, people should all upgrade to Apple's Speak and Spell OS as soon as possible to avoid data loss.....because it's only Microsoft Software that has problems....
Oh, hang on....
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8304229.stm
Maybe not.
De-Registered wrote:Yes, people should all upgrade to Apple's Speak and Spell OS as soon as possible to avoid data loss.....because it's only Microsoft Software that has problems....Oh, hang on....
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8304229.stm
Maybe not.
LOL! That should shut the Apple wierdos up for about 2 days at least.
Unregistered wrote:LOL! That should shut the Apple wierdos up for about 2 days at least.
This really has nothing to do with either Microsoft or Apples' desktop or server software.
The real story is a major corporation selling an online storage & "let us look after your life" service with god knows how much of its client data either did not have a backup or had such a major snafu during an upgrade that the live copy AND its backups died at the same time.
Reading comments by the users I think Danger is stuffed and unfortunately for T-Mobile they are copping part of the blame too, admittedly the comments are filtered by rage at the moment but a large proportion of the posts I have read are claiming to have already left or will leave the service. Nokia, Apple, et al stand to do well out of this.
Regaining peoples trust once you have waved bye bye to their data once will be tough.
I keep my phone synchronised to two different computers in two different locations as well as making a backup to the phone memory card once a week and the computers are backed up too. I would use the Ovi cloud to back up my memory card but it is 16GB and almost full. I guess I could not bother sending the music across and I have a vague distrust of dumping all my stuff on other peoples servers.
Edit.
On an Apple computer using 10.5 or 10.6 there is automated backup software. USB 1TB drives are currently $130.00 AU it takes 10 min to set up a backup.
Is your data worth $130.00 and 10 minutes of your time? Mine sure is.
I am rather paranoid when it comes to backing up my data. However, this paranoia turns to pride (smugness?) when I come up with solutions to problems. I do get caught out with things, but I only get caught out once with each thing!
My S60 phone's memory card (on which my apps live) is backed up several times a dday. I also have a scheduled script running on my laptop to grab backups of my PIM data from the cloud service I use. Apart from actual phone settings, it's pretty hard for me to loose anything.