Last week a “minority” of T-Mobile Sidekick users learned the “Rule of Data Redundancy” the long, slow, hard way – and through no fault of their own.

Sidekick users who stored their data locally (on the device) or backed up their data on a PC through a sync still have their data and should not be affected, but few customers purchased Sidekicks to sync their data with their pc.

Om Malik of GigaOm likens the Sidekick to a dumb terminal or “thin client,” since the device serves mainly as a display and user interface to each Sidekick user’s email, SMS messages, photos, address books and calendars, all stored remotely on servers owned and operated by Microsoft.

Last week, Danger / Microsoft hired Hitachi to do an upgrade to their Storage Area Network (SAN). That’s usually not a problem, as the owner of the data (Microsoft in this case) performs a backup of all the data in case of an issue.

Except in this instance.  While Microsoft still tries to recover lost Sidekick user data, those impacted users were forced to recreate their contact list and calendars to effectively use their device.

For their time and considerable inconvenience, Sidekick customers will be compensated with a mere $100 T-Mobile gift card and a month of free data service.  Two data loss lawsuits were filed this week; this “user experience” will linger for years.

PC World’s David Coursey noted in yesterday’s TechInciter column:

In a letter posted on the T-Mobile customer forum, Microsoft’s Roz Ho, who runs the company’s laughably named “Premium Mobile Experiences” group, said only that a “minority” of Sidekick users suffered data loss. With a supposed 1 million Sidekick customers, a “minority” sounds small but could be up to 499,999 of them.

“We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up,” Ho wrote.

“We rebuilt the system component by component, recovering data along the way. This careful process has taken a significant amount of time, but was necessary to preserve the integrity of the data.”

Those two paragraphs could be replaced by a single sentence: “We weren’t very smart, and we were very slow.”

All information on those impacted Sidekicks is now gone if the smartphone lost power had the battery required removal, or was fully drained.

T-Mobile has halted sales of the Sidekick amid the ongoing issues.

“Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.” — Henry Ford (1863 – 1947)

“Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.” – Auguste Rodin (1840 – 1917)

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