Here's a comment on the engadget page about the story:

If tmobile thinks that they can buy me off with a 19.99 credit after losing every phone # contact i gathered for the last 3-5 years of my life they are sorely mistaken. Class actions here we come. Goodbye tmobile, goodbye sidekick. This is more than unacceptable. Other then this post i am absolutely speechless from rage.

My boss' non-work phone is a Sidekick. Luckily she's got everything backed up at home.

Do you guys locally back up your phones? I have no doubt that I'd be expecting Microsoft to back up their service to me, but I'm still pretty OCD about it--my contacts and calendar and to do list are duplicated once on the Mac and once on the PC, aside from an actual phone backup on the PC.

I don't. But I'm not in the applicable user group. My phone was free with purchase of contract and doesn't connect to my computer in any way.

I would still be pretty pissed if I lost all my contact info. So I should probably do something manually, huh?

With a Sidekick, I don't think there's a way to back up your data out of the box. The Sidekick is a dumb terminal that is tethered to their servers.

I don't think there's a way to back up your data out of the box

Panic stations.

The Sidekick is a dumb terminal that is tethered to their servers.

You're basically running VNC or its ilk?

::clutches E61i tightly::

Major bug in Snow Leopard deletes all user data

Reports have been cropping up on the Apple Support forums that users have been losing all their data due to a nasty bug in Snow Leopard, Apple's latest Operating System. Many users are reporting that all settings are being reset and most data is gone, according to iTWire.

The problem, can easily be reproduced when a user logs into the 'guest' account, either on purpose or by accident, and when they log back out of the account and back into their normal one, they find that their account has been fully reset with all data wiped and lost - the account is like a brand new one. The home directory still exists under "/Users/username" but is completely empty.

Users are reporting that the data is unrecoverable and cannot be found anywhere on the hard drive, and the only way to restore it is if the user has been performing backups on a separate hard-drive. Apparently the problem has been present since a few days after launch, as the forum post dates back to 12th September, but as of yet, Apple has been silent.

It seems the only work around at this stage is to disable the Guest account, or at least disable it and then re-enabling it so that it's a native Snow Leopard account. Another suggestion is to create a new account and enforce parental controls, if you really need a temporary account.

thanks for this. I'm disabling the guest accts on my computer ASAP.

OMG, the snark level of the comments on that site are at Biohazard Level.