Burden Of Backing Up Data Is On The Owner

SEATTLE — When Faron Butler wanted to hear his daughter's voice, he went to the voice mails she left him before she died of cancer at the age of 14.

"If I had a bad day or week, I'd listen to her voice. I'd listen to it a couple of times a week," Butler said Friday from his home in Elma, Wash., holding back tears. "She'd be there, saying, `Daddy, I love you and I miss you.'"

But the voice mails are gone, erased in February when Butler joined a free trial of a messaging service offered by his cellphone carrier, T-Mobile, and he doesn't believe company officials when they say the company can't retrieve them.

The bad news is, I can confirm they cannot be retrieved. While I am not certain of the reason (besides an instant memory flush) I do know T-Mobile has made it clear to sales and support teams that once something like this happens, it's gone for good. It is a bit weird that a change that small would affect it, but it could. It always could.

Public service announcement #1: Any time you have information hosted with someone else, any account change can cause that to be reset. Changing rate plans, taking a promotion, changing billing information, all of those can cause information to be lost or altered. Even employees may not be aware that the requested actions will result in the reset.  As more information is moved to cloud-style storage, this will only become a bigger problem.

Which brings us to Public service announcement #2: If anything precious only exists in one place, find a way to make a backup.  Through speakerphone, recorders, MP3 converters, some visual voicemail apps, there are ways to have backed up this precious voicemail.  After my mother died, I found a draft of an email she was trying to send me on her old computer, and the content was extremely sentimental.  That email exists on dozens of different accounts, in case Yahoo! shuts down or Gmail decides to lose data.  It's important to understand that it is not fair to put a burden of eternal storage on a business, unless that business is data  storage.  Even in the digital world you have to operate on the assumption that shit happens, and think ahead.

I don't want to diminish this man's pain, but to encourage people to help loved ones think ahead and prevent unnecessary repeats of this misery.  There are enough geek forums and tech support choices to back up things we can't live without, please take full advantage of them.