In an attempt to clean up the massive Sidekick gaffe and regain some credibility with customers, Microsoft has started offering a data recovery tool to the affected T-Mobile Sidekick users, who lost their personal data due to Microsoft subsidiary Danger's server malfunction.

Danger, which was acquired by Microsoft last year and manages the company's servers that store Sidekick customer information, was hit by a sizeable outage nearly a week-and-a-half back. The outage resulted in the loss of personal for some Sidekick users, which Microsoft said were only a "minority" of the total users of the service.

With both Microsoft and T-Mobile apparently undertaking the momentous task of repairing the database glitch, the eagerly-awaited Microsoft tool would supposedly help the affected Sidekick users to recover their lost personal data from their mobile devices.

However, while the lost data of the users included their contacts, calendar appointments, personal apps and pictures, the Microsoft tool would essentially help restore the contact information of the users; though Microsoft hopes that it would also probably recover the other important personal data too.

In a statement pertaining to the newly-released recovery tool, Microsoft said that it marks the first phase of data restoration, which will restore the users' contacts as of October 1. To use the tool, the affected Sidekick users have been instructed to log into their My T-Mobile Web site.