Re: Apple's quality and customer service: Not the problem. Neglecting backups is the problem...

In article
<e986b0a7-391f-4f15-8df7-3bb1f035398a@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
m>,
Tom <berger@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

So I had my MBPro back, but I had trouble trusting it and began
backing up weekly.

You learned THE FIRST RULE OF COMPUTING:

Repeat after me: MAKE A BACKUP!

If you don't make a backup you get what you deserve. It's that
simple.

All hard drives fail. NEVER trust a hard drive. This issue has
nothing to do with computer platform.

You said:
Since the data on there was mission critical and the backup was too old,

That's YOUR fault. "Mission critical"? And you don't back up
daily? HUH? Live and learn. We all have.

I
had to use DriveSavers and have the company pay $3200 (yes, you read that
right) to get the data off the drive. Turns out it was just one bad sector in
the boot region but DS charges increase as the amount of recovered data
increases. Nice business model guys....

No. Bad backup strategy Tom. It's that simple. This has nothing
to do with Apple. They support the HARDWARE and the OS. Your data
is YOUR business, not anyone else's. Not Apple's and not the hard
drive manufacturer's. So quit your whining and blaming others for
your error.

The expensive service from DriveSavers actually opens the hard
drive case and retrieves whatever bits are still accessible to
recreate your hard drive as best is possible.

How to solve the bad sector problem yourself (which is
increasingly a problem with modern hard drives which are made
cheaply with lower quality standards):

The free and easy way: ANY time you get a new hard drive,
including the one that comes with your new computer, you need to
perform a LOW LEVEL FORMAT of the drive. You can perform this
from the bootable Mac OS X CD using Disk Utility. Choose your
volume to erase, click on the Erase tab, then the Security
Options button and choose '7 Pass Erase'. This will erase and
test every single bit on your hard drive. Bad sectors are mapped
out and removed. Because bad sectors don't always fail the first
time they are tested it is important to perform multiple tests.
This process is long and boring. Do it over night. But it will
help minimize future bad sector problems. When it is finished,
install Mac OS X.

The way that costs a bit of money: SpeedTools Utilities has a
great utility called Media Scanner. It is much more effective
than Disk Utility at mapping out bad sectors. You can run it on
volumes that already have data, so no erasure is required. It
will tell you what sectors were bad. SpeedTools costs $60, and
that includes free updates for life. Be sure you are using the
latest version as it provides Leopard compatibility.

And, if you want to pay some more money here is a great app you
can use yourself for recovering files from a crashed hard drive,
as long as it is still capable of spinning and reading data. It
is called Data Rescue II. It costs $99, which is way cheaper than
having DriveSavers do it for you. Again, this is a long boring
process but can save you.

And you thought all we did here was advocacy.

:-Derek

--
Fortune Magazine 11-29-05: What's your computer setup today?
Frederick Brooks: I happily use a Macintosh. It's not been
equalled for ease of use, and I want my computer to be a tool,
not a challenge.
<http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/12/12/8363107/>
[Frederick Brooks is the author of 'The Mythical Man Month'.
He spearheaded the movement to modernize computer software
engineering in 1975.]
.

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