Had a really painful experience with my Nokia N900.

Needed to delete all the contacts from the address book. Did just that. Manually. Didn't find "Delete all" option in time. And did not pay attention to a warning "The contacts will be deleted from server". Now all my contact lists from Skype, Gtalk and MSN Messenger from the last 6 years, are just gone.

More info here: http://www.unwiredview.com/2009/11/2...er-im-servers/

Am I an idiot? Yep. I surely feel that way. But I also feel a bit angry at Nokia too. If you are making a consumer device, you are supposed to make it idiot proof.

Yeah, I know N900 is not really a consumer device. There's one more iteration until they get there. Still. Some better warning would have helped.

"Contacts will be deleted from server?". What do I care?

I had the backups, so everything's supposed to be restored anyway. And why should I worry if N900 is deleting contacts from some server, when I'm deleting 10-30 contacts at a time and most of them are phone numbers from my phonebook. And only a few are my IM contacts?

Problem is, the backup saved only those IM contacts that I merged with phone contacts in address book. All others, brought in there from Skype, Gtalk and MSN are lost.

How about the warning that says "All your Skype, GTalk, MSN contacts will be deleted from Skype, GTalk, MSN servers, and we do not back them up with any available utility. So they will be really truly gone". That one, I would have paid attention to.

Anyway. I try to look at the bright side now. 90% of the IM contacts lost were garbage. I don't even have an idea who they are. Some guy or gal who wanted to talk to me at some point in time about something. Good riddance and good phonebook cleanup.

But the other 10%? I'm really gonna miss those.