Some Palm Pre owners are less than pleased with the backup system that Palm and Sprint use to ensure that user's data is retained. One customer has sued Palm and Sprint in Federal court and is seeking class action status.Jason Standiford is suing Palm and Sprint because the backup and restore process has caused an irretrievable loss of data. Mr. Standiford rightly claims that the Pre's OS, WebOS, relies heavily on the cloud rather than syncing locally with a PC. The premise is there is really no need for the end user to worry about their data. The device will ensure the data is safely stored in an online account and if the phone is lost, it is no big deal. Just get a new device and restore the data to the new phone. As the suit points out, you "simply create a Palm profile and let [Palm] handle the rest."

The claim is neither Palm nor Sprint maintain a redundant backup of user's data, so if something does go wrong, the data could be lost forever. Mr. Standiford was working on his fourth warranty return for a new device in mid-November. This is when disaster struck.

After logging into his Palm profile on the device and allowing the restore process to happen, he looked in his contacts and found four contacts where there should have been hundreds. Two were of the Sprint customer service accounts and two others were recently stored. Hundreds of others were gone. He faced similar losses in bookmarks, memos and other data on his device.

The cloud is convenient. I use it for a number of reasons, from syncing data between computers to online backups. I use Microsoft MyPhone to back up my phones, which is a similar service to what Palm has.

This case highlights the perils of the cloud though. It has only been a month or so since thousands of Sidekick users lost their data. Fortunately Microsoft was able to eventually restore most of it by carefully rebuilding the drives where the data was stored.

These companies backing up the data have got to at least have a backup of the backup, and probably should have a backup of that. Storage space today is cheap, especially compared to the cost of bad publicity if something goes wrong. Correction - when something goes wrong. The cloud is nothing but a series of computers and I don't care what redundancy systems you have to store user's data, sometimes a backup is the easiest and cheapest insurance.

If you use the cloud, make sure it isn't your only backup/data protection solution. Use a second service or buy some local storage to back up your critical data to.