Sidekick users feeling scorned over their recent data loss can take a huge sigh of relief today, as Microsoft announced it has begun the first phase of the content restoration process. Personal contacts will be the first bits of data to be restored.

In order to get your data back, you'll need to log into the My T-Mobile website and download the recovery tool. Microsoft says the tool will enable you to view the contacts you had saved as of October 1. With a few simple mouse clicks and a confirmation, those contacts will be restored to your Sidekick.

Naturally, most Sidekick owners have probably already recreated some of the same contacts since the data disaster. If that's the case, you have the option of keeping both sets of contacts, merging them, or just keep whatever contacts are currently on your device.

So what about the rest of your data?

"We continue to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to restore your data," Microsoft said. "We're making solid progress on the next phase in the restoration process, including your photographs, notes, to-do lists, marketplace data, and high scores."

Phew! Glad to see that "high scores" is included in the fray!

T-Mobile Sidekick owners last week were reminded about the risks of relying too heavily on cloud computing when a massive failure at Microsoft's Danger subsidiary left the handheld owners without access to the Web or their address book for several days.

If that weren't bad enough, after some of the data had been recovered, Microsoft on Saturday told customers that any other missing data may be permanently lost. While it's not uncommon for outages to occur, the potential for permanently lost data casts a dark cloud over, er, cloud computing.

For Microsoft, the timing couldn't be any worse. Next month, the software giant will launch Windows Azure, an operating system in the cloud. Microsoft is quick to point out that the Azure service is built with redundancy in mind and is able to withstand failures in single or multiple nodes, but will that be enough to convince users to put their confidence in the cloud?