My wife mentioned to me a week or so ago that one of her work colleagues had recently had a hard drive crash on her laptop. Having replaced it, she wanted to try to get some of the data back from the disk, because she had a lot of family photos on there which were not backed up (I’m sure this experience has informed her future back-up plans).
However she had taken it to a local store, which I won’t name, who quoted her £600 to recover the photos. £600! They could be excused some element of estimate padding here, since you never know how long these things might take, but £600 really is taking the p*ss. Even if it took them a couple of days constantly sitting at the machine to recover the data, that would be an inflated rate for this kind of work. At the least they could have done a quick initial test and told her how difficult it was likely to be.
I was disgusted when I heard, so I volunteered to take a look at it. It took a while to process everything, but most of that was a machine chugging away in a corner without me having to do anything. I connected the drive up to a Linux machine, so I had the option of using free tools (like PhotoRec and ddrescue) to try to manually scan / repair the disk if it was too badly damaged, but it turned out that wasn’t necessary; even though some of the blocks were certainly damaged, most of the disk was in good enough condition to get the most important data back.
I felt embarrassed that someone in ‘my’ industry tried to take advantage like that, especially of an individual over their precious family photos. Quoting the price of a new laptop to recover some data? Maybe they just didn’t want to do it, so quoted a silly price to get rid of her. Maybe they were paranoid about getting bogged down in a messy data retrieval task, although that could have been mitigated with an hour of staff effort (and a few hours of unattended machine time), which they could have required as a minimum, and should have cost less than a tenth of that price. Or maybe they just didn’t know what they were doing. Worst case scenario would be if they deliberately quoted a stupidly inflated price because they knew the photos were irreplaceable and that she’d pay whatever they asked, but I’d prefer not to believe that.
Shameful, either way.
August 31st, 2008 at 7:04 pm
That sounds reasonable depending on what they’re doing. My mom recently had her hard drive die and the place she sent it to said that it could cost anywhere between $100 and $2500 for recovery (depending on what’s wrong with the drive). Of course, she doesn’t pay anything if they can’t recover the files.
Ultimately, they might have to physically remove the platters and put them in a different drive in a clean room environment which takes a certain amount of money and skill to setup.
August 31st, 2008 at 8:25 pm
In my country (Argentina) they do that for £10-30.
Unless the HDD is badly damaged like btmorex said and they would need to remove the platters (Which wasn’t your case).
Obviously they were trying to take advantage or were too afraid on how bad it was.
Cheers
Dark Sylinc
PS: At least she got your photos back
August 31st, 2008 at 8:50 pm
So did you charge, or were you that geeky friend of a friend that just *loves* to do all this stuff anyway
September 1st, 2008 at 5:06 am
Got a hard disk that will not work, try putting it in the freezer.
September 1st, 2008 at 7:47 am
Last time I had my hard drive crashed, it was because of a short circuit on the electronic part of the disk, and there were all my photos from the last two years (no backup, of course). I wanted to recover the files, but the prices on the Internet were pretty high.
Finally, I waited for my next trip to China, and I had it entirely recovered for 100 Yuan (= $10). Of course, I wouldn’t have had to pay if the guy didn’t manage to recover the files…
September 1st, 2008 at 8:18 am
Of course if they had to physically dissassemble the drive that’s something else entirely, but what I found annoying is they obviously just quoted that huge price without even testing the drive; because I could mount it just fine in about 5 minutes and found all the photos (the only thing that was important) very quickly.
@Paul: no, I’m not going to charge, beyond the £3 I needed to buy a converter so I could connect the 2.5″ drive to a regular PATA cable. It wasn’t much trouble and I kinda wanted to prove that some IT people are actually helpful rather than just doing the ‘dodgy builder’ routine (sucks air in - “oooo, that’s gonna be expensive…”).
September 1st, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Sometimes these prices are raised, because they don’t want to do it. I can remembert, that the aunt of my girlfriend had to pay much over one hundred euros to get her MS Works files copied to a newer computer. Simply, she even did understand what they were doing with the computer and I doubt, the shop was very keen to do such trivial and stupid task…
September 1st, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Yeah, I included the ‘we don’t want to do it’ option in my possible explanations list.
If that’s it, I think it’s a bit sad though - talk about lack of human empathy. I wouldn’t want anyone to lose their only copies of their family photos - sure they should have backed them up, but not everyone is a technical wizard or thinks about these things, and if there’s a chance you can help them out, why not try? What use are technical skills if you don’t put them to positive use?
Maybe they’ve just become so jaded & pissed off with being on call for people’s technical problems that they can’t see the human side of it anymore. I can understand that, I was in tech support for a long time and it’s stressful, but a good way to stay motivated yourself is to enjoy helping people (at least those who appreciate it, which I realise can be scarce sometimes, but this is surely an opportunity to make someone happy). If you’re in tech support and you don’t like helping people you’re probably in the wrong job.
September 2nd, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Aye I was only joking about the charging
Saw this today, figured you might enjoy it ‘Freedom Fry ? “Happy birthday to GNU”‘: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dcxtEKShXA
September 2nd, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Pretty excruciating - I think Fry should stick to what he’s good at, ie QI etc.
I’m obviously an open source fan, but it’s been my observation that most of the kind of people who suggest that *all* software should be free by nature are those who make their living doing something other than writing that software, or get paid via offshoots of some other activity (like those who get sponsored by Google / IBM). As pointed out in my previous post on open source and business, it’s a crock of utopian bullshit to suggest that all types of software can be free and programmers will still be able to eat. Lots of code can and should be open source, particularly the kind of bedrock foundations that allow more complex things to be built on top - and I support that not just in rhetoric but in effort (see Ogre), but it doesn’t work for everything without exploiting a lot of people’s goodwill. If you’re one of the lucky ones who can write free/open source software and get paid for it without having to be involved in selling software too, then congratulations, but there aren’t that many of you. The rest of us will have to dabble in non-free software just to make ends meet, although many of us do still contribute to open source as well.
If Fry really believed in the universal principles of Freedom, then all his books, films and TV works would be 100% copyable, redistributable and modifiable. I note that none of them are. I guess it’s a different rule when it’s your own work, right? The last person who should be preaching to me about free software is a man who not only doesn’t have to earn a living making software, but who also copyrights & controls his own works (because obviously he wants to make money from them).
Fry just lost a major slice of credibility with me.
September 2nd, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Absolutely insane price. The only solution is in more educated PC users who can discriminate for pricing atleast. The very same people around me who can discriminate in quality of cloth are unable to discriminate between XP and Vista here. If that is not amazing, then my friend a girl post graduate in computer science doesnot know to unzip a file, and thinks XP with theme packs is actually Vista, never mind asking her about 32 bit and 64 bit. The problem is well awareness. Oh we can pass exams by mugging, so this is the result for many.
September 3rd, 2008 at 5:34 pm
@Steve tee hee hee… I must say the actors guild from “Team America” came to mind after watching it. Actors know *everything*