Microsoft has announced the restoration of Sidekick users' contacts as the first milestone in recovering data it lost in the cloud computing disaster affecting its Danger subsidiary, while a new source explains why the restoration was possible without a backup and why it is taking so long.

Somewhat ironically, Microsoft's capacity to recover most of its Sidekick users' data is entirely due to the availability of Sun and Oracle experts and the inherent resilience of those company's products to disasters of any kind, even in cases where customers do not maintain proper backups of their data.