As if the world needed a catastrophic event to show us of the pitfalls of cloud computing, Microsoft messed up royally by losing data (contacts, calendars, pictures, etc) for hundreds of thousands of Sidekick users and I’m surprised something of this magnitude didn’t happen sooner.
Ouch, though… ouch…
The effects of this will continue to ripple for a while and it’s a reminder about the importance of keeping your own backups, but, on the other hand, it does pose the question about how easily this can be done with everything in the cloud made more complicated by the fact that it is in the hands of many different companies & services.