A1 is exactly what happened. They didn’t lose it accidentally, which I would have understood. This is a service they offer, for a set price. I could bring my computer in weekly or monthly and pay them to back it up for me if I wanted to.
Yes, I KNOW I should have done my own back-ups. But I wasn’t contractually obligated to do that. If that were the case, they would have asked me to bring copies of my data in before they worked on my computer. They didn’t. The purpose of the visit was recovery and back-up (although obviously NOT in that order!).
I called the corporate offices yesterday. I’m waiting for a call-back, but I have little faith they’ll try to compensate me. I didn’t know what price to put on it, but I told them I thought they should give me some sort of monetary compensation, over and above the freebie I got on the recovery. I hope they call me today.
Actually, Kalhoun, you probably were contractually obligated to do that. I’ve done some PC support for a living, and its pretty standard to have a customer sign a piece of paper saying that the repairperson is not responsible for loss of data and that you should back up your data before brining it in. I wouldn’t expect much from Best Buy either, except someone telling you to read the fine print on the service paperwork.
I’d be pissed as well. And ranting. I’ve done my share of work on my relative’s PCs over the years so they won’t have some incompetent Best Buy person doing the work. But I wouldn’t expect Best Buy to do anything.
I wouldn’t expect much frm Best Buy either, but I don’t get it…why on earth would you pay someone 80$ to back up your data for you, then be expected to back up the data yourself before you pay them to back it up for you?
Because hard drives crash in the middle of data backups. Because you burn data to a CD and then go to restore it to find that the CD, which you tested, got scratched and is bad and you’ve lost all the data anyway. Because shit happens.
At least you have someone to be pissed at. Had your harddrive just crashed and burned at home, or your PC with all your data gotten stolen, you could only be mad at yourself.
If I give my car to the mechanic for an oil change and I find out afterwards that he’s actually put sugar through the engine and made it unusable? Is it acceptable that he refund the money of the oil change?
AFAIK, as soon as Best Buys offers to back up your data, all liability for the data is theirs by de-facto. The most reasonable solution would be for Best Buys to have a sort of insurance policy where, before you hand them the HD, you estimate the rough value of the data on there and they charge you a % of that as a premium. If they lose the data, they pay out that much. Since they cover their ass like this, I would say it’s their responsibility to cover the full cost of the data on that drive (by sending it off to some forensic service for data extraction).
Well, from experience, if you take your car into Jiffy Lube and they don’t put the oil cap back on the drain and you end up burning out your engine, you will have a darn hard time collecting.
Depending on what this “Recovery” actually does, there is a good chance the data is still on the disk. File systems generally work by having one small section per file that keeps track of where on the actual disk the data for that file lives. Deleting the file just dis-associates that pointer from the actual data. The data itself remains on the disk until some other file operation writes over it. That’s how them magic FBI-types get data that you thought you deleted.
To keep your data on the disk (if it’s still there), you should turn off your computer and use another one for the time being, if possible. Do a google search on “recover deleted files” to find a number of tools (that you’d likely have to pay for) for recovering deleted files. There may be some freeware or cheap-ware options.
Good luck, and I’d be happy to try to help you get your data back.
Why not? If putting the cap back on is an expected part of the service and it was not performed then they damn well should be responsible for the consequences. Besides, there was no intervention on the users part AT ALL. He gave them the HD under an implicit guarentee than all the data would be safe.
Actually, I had a friend who had a wheel alignment done. They forgot to put the lug nuts back on and the wheel flew off. You betcherass they compensated them!
Thanks, Beezlebubba, for your offer. However, they assured me they shit-canned it all. They did a complete recovery.
By the way, to some of you…I am not a “he.” This is sometimes hard to detect because I have a foul mouth. But I’m a “she.”
