Computer Repair Horror Stories – Back Up Your Hard Disk!

As a computer repair tech the customer is responsible for his/her data no matter what. That story is unfortunate. Geek Squad is not known for there tried and true valued customer motto.

[...] the original post: Computer Repair Horror Stories – Backup Your Hard Disk! ~ The … July 30th, 2009 | Tags: apple, computer repair, horror-stories, innovation, Internet, microsoft, [...]

Acronis True Image is the only way to go man. As for the unfortunate gentleman in the story above, he’s obviously much more civilized than me. Had this been done to my machine, w/o my authorization, I would have, w/o hesitation, ‘made an example of’ one or more geeks. In other words – I’d have made a “lasting impression”….or two!

[...] Back up your hard drive, and avoid being one of the “computer horror stories”. [...]

[...] Back up your hard drive, and avoid being one of the “computer horror stories”. [...]

In whose best interest is it to have the data backed up? While the story was of a non-authorized hard drive replacement- the other points are completely valid: the parcel could go missing (stolen or lost) or any other number of things that could spell no PC returned…

Back up your data if it’s of any value to you- and do it often. It’s your data.

T

Thanks for the comments.

Buffet – Acronis is the best way to go.

[...] Back up your hard drive and avoid being one of the “computer horror stories.” [...]

I run a computer repair shop in a small rural town in TN. I always backup a clients document folder and desktop data before any repair assuming the drive is good.

I feel we are responsible for a clients machine once they bring it here.

Thats what good customer service is about, seems to many have forgotten that…

Hello Mary,
Excellent point. Your customers are fortunate to have you looking out for them.
Regards, Ron

[...] Back up your hard drive, and avoid being one of the “computer horror stories”. [...]

I personally copy all my data once a week to my 500gb seagate portable drive. It takes time, but nothing like loosing all my data, and the time it would take to get it back. Usually takes me 10 hours to back uip my entire itunes and movie collection. Over 240 movies and 9000+ songs, plus 5k+ pictures, and documents. Now thats a backup job, and done weekly!

I’ve never heard of having hard drives changed without authorization or notification before. I’ve always had positive experiences with the Geek Squad…perhaps it’s just the Geek Squad that I deal with here.

Nonetheless, I don’t even store my personal data locally on my laptop. My desktop is homebuilt, so I do all repairs, etc., myself, but my laptop was purchased from Best Buy. I store all my critical data on my external hard drive.

I primarily run Linux and have three distros of Ubuntu installed, plus Vista. I have nothing in Vista which would hurt me to lose, and everything that is remotely valuable or sensitive is, as I said, stored on the external. My email client is pointed to a partition on the external, which enables me to deal with my emails on most any computer I have. My music is stored there along with my videos, and all important documents are backed up there.

I don’t even need to back it all up, as it’s all on the back up. And every once in a while I back the external up to an internal SATA drive in my desktop for additional security through redundancy. For added redundancy I have a great deal of my personal files backed up to DVD-R, as well.

There is another consideration to be made in backing up your data…catastrophic hard drive failure. You don’t need to take your computer in for repair for you to lose your data. If your hard drive crashes and burns (and they do all the time, sometimes quite unexpectedly) you will lose your data as surely as if the shop replaces your hard drive.

<Usually takes me 10 hours to back uip my entire itunes
<and movie collection. Over 240 movies and 9000+ songs,
<plus 5k+ pictures, and documents. Now thats a backup job,
<and done weekly!

You know, Anthony; it sounds like you could cut down on that time significantly if you only backed up what has changed, rather than the whole kit and kaboodle. It’s unnecessary to re-back up the same files (at least, the unchanged ones) every week, and it causes unnecessary strain on both hard drives in the additional (10 hours worth!) read/write operations, resulting in decreasing the life of both hard drives.

If you could find some way to back up ONLY the files that are new or that have changed, you would save a lot of time and extend the life of your drives.

We all find out moments too late when our data is lost what could be done to prevent it. I recently had a data scare at work and wrote an about it. My name is the link to the write up.