Microsoft tossed Sidekick owners a bone on Thursday when it announced that some of the user data it lost had been recovered. The company had previously said that all Sidekick user data had been lost following a server failure, casting doubt on the reliability of cloud-based computing.

In a statement for Sidekick users, Microsoft Corporate Vice President Roz Ho said that "most, if not all customer data" has been recovered.

She added that the data loss was the result of a system failure that impacted the core database and the database backup.

T-Mobile Sidekick owners have been dealing with the loss of their contacts, calendars, note and photos ever since the Microsoft servers that store their content failed. The cell service provider said in a statement "Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger's latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device -- such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos -- that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger."


Microsoft is first restoring user's contacts, and then plans to move on to calendars, notes, tasks, photos and high scores. Ms. Ho added "We have made changes to improve the overall stability of the Sidekick service and initiated a more resilient backup process to ensure that the integrity of our database backups is maintained."

Assuming the changes Microsoft made really do improve Sidekick server reliability, that's good news for T-Mobile customers. Overcoming the distrust in cloud-based data storage the incident may have created, however, will likely take more than server upgrades.