So Microsoft/Danger lost all the data from their sidekick clients (contacts, photos, calendars, todos, etc…) and although those things might happen (although Microsoft should know how to keep the data safe and redundant) the fact that their service doesn’t allow you to export/sync the data stopped everyone from keeping their own backups.
Christopher Blizzard explains the problem quite well :
This is what bothers me about devices like the Sidekick and services like Facebook. Data goes in and it doesn’t come out. (In Facebook’s case you “own your own data” but if you pull it out it comes with usage restrictions so it’s essentially useless. You can’t use it to sync to another data source or another service. The rhetoric there doesn’t match the actual terms of service.) It means you can’t make backups and you can’t get to the point where you have a single set of data because you’re syncing with a bunch of services.
Lock-in by effect or lock-in by design isn’t something that any of us should be tolerating, but we do. In our cell phones, in our web services – lots of places. But we should be aware. Sometimes someone makes a mistake that affects tends of thousands or hundreds of thousands of us. And because of early decisions we’re not able to recover from it in a decentralized manner.