• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, December 8, 2009

A Palm Pre user who allegedly lost his contacts and other data stored in the cloud has filed a potential class-action lawsuit against both Palm and Sprint Nextel.

In papers filed late last week in federal district court in San Jose, Jason Standiford alleges that he lost access to a host of information that was stored on Palm's servers after exchanging a defective unit. Among the missing data are contact information, numerous memos and all of his bookmarks, according to his lawsuit. "All in all, Palm lost almost all of Standiford's data that it promised to back up and store for him," the lawsuit alleges.

Standiford, a San Francisco resident, alleges that Palm encourages users to rely on its cloud storage service because people can't sync their devices to personal computers without additional software. What's more, he says, Palm overwrites the data in its servers on a daily basis without backing up the information. That system resulted in "significant and permanent data loss," Standiford alleges in his lawsuit, filed by Michael Aschenbrenner of KamberEdelson.

Standiford alleges that he lost the data in mid-November, but that Palm had found and restored some of the missing information by last Thursday. The lawsuit accuses Palm and Sprint of breach of contract, negligence and violating California's business code.

Palm hasn't responded to Online Media Daily's request for comment, but late last month the company stated that some users of the Pre and Pixi had lost data after attempting to change devices.

Some T-Mobile Sidekick users also suffered a recent, well-publicized data loss, although T-Mobile later said it had managed to restore some data. That company currently faces potential class-action lawsuits brought by Sidekick users.