This week has been a rough one for T-Mobile's Sidekick users. T-Mobile's Sidekick service experienced a prolonged data outage and today came the really bad news. The servers Microsoft, T-Mobile and Danger use to store all the data for Sidekicks have crashed, and all user data appears to have been lost.This is a code red cloud disaster. Sidekick users noticed downed data services earlier this week. T-Mobile and Microsoft/Danger have been in constant touch with those customers, letting them know that they're on it. Today's update was not happy news. Here's the full text of the admission:

Dear valued T-Mobile Sidekick customers:

T-Mobile and the Sidekick data services provider, Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft, are reaching out to express our apologies regarding the recent Sidekick data service disruption.

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We appreciate your patience as Microsoft/Danger continues to work on maintaining platform stability, and restoring all services for our Sidekick customers.

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. That said, our teams continue to work around-the-clock in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information. However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely low. As such, we wanted to share this news with you and offer some tips and suggestions to help you rebuild your personal content. You can find these tips in our Sidekick Contacts FAQ. We encourage you to visit the Forums on a regular basis to access the latest updates as well as FAQs regarding this service disruption.

In addition, we plan to communicate with you on Monday (Oct. 12) the status of the remaining issues caused by the service disruption, including the data recovery efforts and the Download Catalog restoration which we are continuing to resolve. We also will communicate any additional tips or suggestions that may help in restoring your content.

We recognize the magnitude of this inconvenience. Our primary efforts have been focused on restoring our customers' personal content. We also are considering additional measures for those of you who have lost your content to help reinforce how valuable you are as a T-Mobile customer.

We continue to advise customers to NOT reset their device by removing the battery or letting their battery drain completely, as any personal content that currently resides on your device will be lost.

Once again, T-Mobile and Microsoft/Danger regret any and all inconvenience this matter has caused.

I'll give T-Mobile and Microsoft/Danger some degree of credit for being so transparent about the problems, though it is sort of unforgivable that multiple back-ups weren't available to restore user data.

According to all parties involved, if users haven't pulled their battery or otherwise reset their device, there's hope they can make a local back-up somewhere. A problem like this underscores the problem with cloud-based services.

T-Mobile isn't alone in the service they provide. Other mobile companies, such as Google, Apple, Palm, and Microsoft, have cloud-based data management systems that users can take advantage of. I think the bottom line here is pretty clear. Cloud storage can certainly provide for a back-up that's mostly trustworthy, but making sure you back-up data locally can prevent real disasters.