At last there is a silver lining to this T-Mobile Sidekick disaster: you can get out of your contract.

As we reported yesterday, it appears that T-Mobile not only made Sidekick users go without their data for a week, they ended up completely losing everything.

Originally T-Mobile was offering a free month of data services as an apology for the week long outage, but now at least one person is reporting to Gizmodo that you can get out of your contract for free due to the data loss.  According to the T-Mobile customer, they were offered a slightly discounted G1, a phone that runs on Google Android, told about BlackBerry units or apparently you can just leave the carrier all together.

The T-Mobile site is also currently showing all versions of the Sidekick as “Temporarily out of stock.”

No matter how you slice it, this was a disaster for T-Mobile and for their customers.  While it is understandable that some consumers didn’t have their data backed up locally, what possible excuse is there for people who work professionally in the data industry to have not done so?  One of the first rules of any upgrade is to back up your data, so why didn’t T-Mobile?

If I was a Sidekick user, I wouldn’t only be getting out of my contract, but leaving the carrier all together.  (I was with T-Mobile for one 2-year contract from 2005 to 2007 … that was enough)