Microsoft is now saying that “most, if not all” Sidekick data thought to be lost in a server upgrade to Danger’s Sun/Oracle platform can now be recovered, according to a press release issued by Roz Ho, Corporate Vice-President for Premium Mobile Services.

We are pleased to report that we have recovered most, if not all, customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage. We plan to begin restoring users’ personal data as soon as possible, starting with personal contacts, after we have validated the data and our restoration plan. We will then continue to work around the clock to restore data to all affected users, including calendar, notes, tasks, photographs and high scores, as quickly as possible.

Mary Jo Foley, in her All About Microsoft blog, has more, confirming Hitachi’s role in the upgrade, and  including the interesting tidbit that foul play has not been ruled out:

One of my Microsoft sources told me

“(T)he data loss issue was caused by a hardware update on the existing Danger service that had NOT been ported over to a Microsoft platform and the issue was NOT part of a transition to an MS back end. It was an Oracle dB and Sun SAN solution that got a bad firmware update and the backup failed.”

Since then, I’ve heard from others that this scenario seems likely and that yes, Hitachi Data Systems was the company actually doing the maintenance/update for Microsoft. I’ve also heard that foul play has not been ruled out because the failure was so catastrophic and seemingly deliberate. Microsoft is supposedly continuing to do a full investigation.

MobileCrunch at TechCrunch had a report on October 5th that morale was low with Roz Ho’s team, that many Danger employees had been fired, and that the mysterious “Pink” project was close to collapsing.  If indeed sabotage was at play, things might even be worse in Premium Mobile Services than described.