[ryleyinstl]

While Sidekick users loosing their data sucks this is hardly common. All this "the could is evil" stuff is a bit much. Like others have mentioned, if your worried about data, Pre users can backup their data in a number of other ways every once in a while.

[Mungo]

There is alot of questions that Palm has to answer. If I am own a company, and have say 100 sales reps who use their company issued Palm Pre's to make calls and keep customer contact lists, what happens to the data if one of the sales people is terminated.

Can I remote delete? = yes
Can I recover the data and sync with a new Pre? = Yes, if I have the password to the Palm profile.
It gets worse if you migrated from Treo Pros, and uploaded the Contacts to the Palm Profile and not Google.

[Stroven Taulrok]

The sidekick didn't use the actual cloud, it used a single set of servers tied to those devices alone, the cloud is a redundancy server system built for almost any MID, so when one server fails, there are several others to pick up the slack.

[hparsons]

There is alot of questions that Palm has to answer. If I am own a company, and have say 100 sales reps who use their company issued Palm Pre's to make calls and keep customer contact lists, what happens to the data if one of the sales people is terminated.

Can I remote delete? = yes
Can I recover the data and sync with a new Pre? = Yes, if I have the password to the Palm profile.
It gets worse if you migrated from Treo Pros, and uploaded the Contacts to the Palm Profile and not Google.

If you have 100 sales reps, I would hope you're using an EAS enabled solution.

[ashakouri1]

How do I backup my contacts? I really don't care about other stuff. But I just want a copy of my contacts to backup.

[hparsons]

How do I backup my contacts? I really don't care about other stuff. But I just want a copy of my contacts to backup.

It depends on how you are using the device. If the Palm profile is your default for contacts, you are storing them only on the Pre, and the it's backing up to your profile on the server.

If you're using Google or Exchange for your default contacts, then whichever service is running has the contacts.

[mdehaven]

The sidekick didn't use the actual cloud, it used a single set of servers tied to those devices alone, the cloud is a redundancy server system built for almost any MID, so when one server fails, there are several others to pick up the slack.

Yes that. The Sidekick system is in no way "the cloud", it is a single provider system with a single point of failure.

My contacts are currently stored with Google primarily. I have it set up to sync to Yahoo!, and stored on my phone. My primary calendar is Google, set to sync several times a day with my local Outlook, and from there my company's Exchange server, and on my phone. My primary email is a Gmail account, which is archived locally once a week. I have multiple points of backup, which is what the cloud is designed to do. If Google were to disappear tomorrow, I still have all my data.

I would be curious to know why a server crash and data loss would "sync" back to the phone and delete the info there, since those records were not marked as deleted, which is the only way it should remove anything from the sync partners. It sounds like some programmers were just lazy.

[DougB541#CB]

Yeah this is not a "cloud" issue but a stupid decision by Danger (and stupid decision by MS not to fix it).


Besides, your HDD could go down just as easily as the "cloud"....the real pro tip here is always backup your data.

[DJeremyC]

For me I have a few contacts imported from Facebook and Google etc, most were however on the Palm Profile only...thus only on the Pre and the Palm backup servers.

I dont have any other backup solutions at the moment. So is there a way to pull a file off the Pre like most phones... on PalmOS all contacts were kept in a file and when you hotsync it would backup that file...so we should be able to pull that file off the Pre...no?

or is there a better way of doing this, as I would like a better local sync/backup solution (prefer it not cost me an arm and leg to get either) that I can store on my external HD.

Thanks

[deweydecibel]

You people need to quit debating the definition; cloud or not - the end result is they were performing maintenance on a SAN and doing so without first taking a backup. That IS why the cloud sucks - because any cloud service can make you all the promises in the world about redundancy, DR, business continuity, HA or failover systems but you cannot promise a fix for human stupidity or human error. The engineers or technicians that were performing the upgrade should've made a backup even if they had full confidence in the live maintenance procedure. Yes, even your local hard drive could fail. A backup is a backup is a backup. A weak password is a weak password is a weak password - period.

Always make sure you have a backup of your data. Always make sure your backup is good and can be restored from. Always have a strong password.

You can't fix stupid.