Nokia is attempting to position itself as much more than a handset company. It is rife with other services, such as Comes With Music, or Contacts On Ovi, where people can upload pictures and save contact data directly from their phone. That is, when it works. A recent server crash completely lost three weeks' worth of user data.Eek, this is exactly what we don't want to hear. Nokia isn't alone in this sort of offering. Apple has something similar with its MobileMe product, and Microsoft is set to unveil its My Phone service, which serves the same purpose.

That purpose is to provide a repository that is supposed to be safer than our fragile mobile phones for storing vital data, such as contacts. We implicitly trust these companies with our content and have faith that their servers are fail-safe and backed up.

Well, that's not what happened this week.

One of Nokia's Contacts On Ovi servers that manages the chat function failed due to a broken cooler, which resulted in a series of catastrophic events that led to a total crash. The last reliable backup that Nokia could recover was dated Jan. 23, meaning anything synced and stored by users between Jan. 23 and Feb. 9 was lost completely.

Kristian Luoma, an Ovi product manager wrote: "Words can't explain how incredibly sorry we are for the inconvenience. We're sorry for the lost contacts in your phonebooks. We're sorry that the profile pictures you love, and we love, too, are gone. Nothing can make this right, we know, but we're hoping that you can forgive us and give another chance to give you good service."

As MocoNews points out, this disaster could have been much worse. Share on Ovi and the beta Contacts on Ovi don't have the same userbase as, say, Facebook. But that doesn't mean the affected users don't feel any less anger and resentment.

The issue makes me question how much of our lives we entrust to companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, MySpace, and Yahoo. Are there things that we shouldn't trust to the untouchable cloud? Should we always back up to a local hard drive that we can access if necessary? Should cloud storage systems be rated for efficiency and trustworthiness? All questions that deserve thought, especially if you're trusting the cloud with your business's data.