The recent crash of the Microsoft-owned Danger server that hosted data for millions of T-Mobile Sidekick users really got me thinking about the global dependence on technology, mostly, because I am a victim of this major data loss.

In a letter issued to Sidekick users, T-Mobile wrote “based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger.”

As journalism major, it’s hard to swallow the fact that 3 years worth of my networking efforts are gone.

I can imagine that for anyone who has a career or is pursuing a career that requires a vast amount of networking knows what it would feel like to all of a sudden be stripped of crucial contact information.

What is someone supposed to do when they wake up to find their phone’s memory wiped?

With no physical phonebook to turn to, I headed over to Facebook asking friends and family to send me their phone numbers as I began work on rebuilding my list of contacts.

Still, this won’t ever make up for the hundreds of phone numbers lost in this process.

So, what do we do differently?

I’m not only talking to Sidekick users, I’m talking to anyone who relies on a phone as a means to store crucial information, to those of you who rely on Facebook to host your photos, writing, etc., to anyone who relies on some form of technology or the internet to host information that could otherwise physically be stored elsewhere.

This type of data loss shows that no one of is safe.

Data loss can happen to phone servers, social media, and God forbid, e-mail servers.

Does anyone even remember phonebooks, or photo albums you could hold in your hands and flip through?

It’s time we start keeping these again. It’s not enough to rely on technology.

At the rate we’re going, it won’t be long before we’ll be printing pages from Facebook for posterity.