So I still haven’t gotten it back. I called Apple and waded through their stupid latticework of customer support levels only to reach “dispatch” who confirmed what I suspected, my drive has still not been mailed back out to me yet. I asked them, well could you please mail it? They said no, because repair has it. I told them to tell repair to mail it to me then. They said that they did but repair is backlogged with repairs from the holiday. I point out that they were supposed to mail it before the holiday and they say they know and they’re sorry. So I tell them to mail me my drive and they say that repair will as soon as they have time. I tell them I’m leaving the country soon and I really need my drive before then, and the lady says there’s nothing she can do because she’s dispatch (who is in charge of this problem) not repair. So I say, can I talk to someone in repair then and she tells me no. I say why not? And I’m told because there is no way of doing that. Presumedly I am to believe that the actual repair center lacks telephone technology. So I tell her I really need my drive back, what can I do to get it sooner and she asks me when I’m leaving the country. I tell her in a week but I really need the data on the drive before then. She offers me the ever so helpful advice of “don’t worry about it, because it says here that we didn’t do the data transfer because we couldn’t make the drive mount, so you probably won’t be able to recover the data anyway.”
ARRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!
Gee, lady, thankyou for your ever so helpful assement of the situation… *sigh* and people wonder why there’s gang violence.
Y’know, it’s entirely possible that reading your entries about Apple keeping your hardware hostage is what caused me to have a dream a couple nights ago where and I had to rescue , who had been kidnapped by what appeared to be an Apple cult.
I know the feeling
I picked up a LaCie 30gb external pocket drive a while back. Backed up all my data to it, while I reformatted both computers. I got some basic info off it, but then I got busy with work and school and such. Went travelling… got down to where I was going, pulled out the drive (this is a drive explicitly designed for portability, mind you)… and it wouldn’t mount.
I sent it off to LaCie (who were very cool about the whole thing, actually… kudos to them). They couldn’t fix it, so they sent it to a specialist data recovery center (one of the best in the country, but semi-affordable with the LaCie discount). A week or two later, I get a call from the recovery center saying that they couldn’t recover ANY data off the drive. Total cost: $300 to find that out.
On the bright side, LaCie sent me a brand new drive that actually has a better bus than the original (original was two firewire ports and a usb port… this one is two firewire ports and a usb2 port).
Now I have everything archived in triplicate: two drives plus monthly cd archiving.