The recent T-Mobile announcement, to recompense Sidekick users - who lost personal data due to a service outage - with $100 gift card, has only added insult to their injury of having lost their address books, busy calendars, photos, and countless notes!

The last week massive server failure at the Microsoft subsidiary Danger, which provides cloud-based T-Mobile data services to Sidekick users, resulted in the loss of user's personal data, including stored phone numbers, pictures, calendars and other content, which possibly may never be retrieved.

With the loss of personal data being a disquieting factor by itself for the Sidekick users, the seemingly slow T-Mobile response to the problem and its decision to extend a "token" $100 can only invite further ire of the affected users.

Though there has been no formal disclosure about how many of the Sidekick's one million users have been affected by the glitch, it is being said that the data of some users has been recovered. T-Mobile has also talked of a possibility of Microsoft recovering some data for the remaining affected users.

All said and done, the data loss episode underlines the T-Mobile's limitation of supporting designing systems that lack multiple backups to ensure the safety of users' data. Furthermore, the fact that Sidekick was so dependent on data stored apparently in only one place is just another example of a poor design!