A cautionary backup tale

[Col]

From Smalldog Electronics via Tony

Data Recovery vs. Backing Up
By Matt Klein, Service Operations Manager

One of the toughest things a technician has to do is tell customers that their hard drive has failed and recovering the data will likely cost thousands of dollars. A Small Dog customer brought in her 24-inch iMac earlier this month because it would not start up. It was on the bench and diagnosed as a failed hard drive a few hours later, and we contacted her with a few options: replace the hard drive under warranty and return the failed drive to Apple, or send the drive to DriveSavers for professional recovery.

DriveSavers is widely acknowledged as the most capable and best-equipped data recovery firm in the world, and our customer was happy to receive an external hard drive with 100% of her data mere days after sending in the toasted one. She was not happy about the bill, though, which was more than the cost of her computer!

We spoke at length on the phone about how all hard drives fail eventually and how she needs to have a backup system in place. She clearly understood what I was saying, and I made it clear that our conversation was not really about sales but about her protection. No backup drive was purchased.

Three weeks later, the warranty hard drive replacement has failed again. She didn’t back it up and has lost three weeks of work and simply cannot afford the pricey recovery again.

David Lerner, an owner of the preeminent New York City Apple Specialist and repair shop Tekserve, has in his email signature “May you have 1,000 backups and never need one.” It’s a mantra we all should take seriously.

This is just one more sad story about 100% preventable data loss. Do yourself a favor and get a Time Capsule, an external drive, email important documents to yourself or stash them on your iDisk. A $200 Time Capsule is much cheaper than a $2200 data recovery!

Time Capsule 500GB from $199.99
Time Capsule 1TB from $349.99
(be sure to click the green links on the following product pages to view all specials)

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[Julian Hebbrecht]

A Buffalo (and other brands) hard drive of I TB costs only ¥14,000 - so why does a similar time capsule drive have to cost twice as much??
Looks like a typical Apple overpricing again to me.
Julian

[Col]

The Time Machine can connect via WiFi or Ethernet and this adds to the cost, but you are right that the Time Capsule is expensive.