No. You can’t have it

The perils of backing up hit hard here this week. Not us as an organisation or us as an IT team but one of our users.

Just after half past eight he came in. “Am I too early?” he asked. He looked devastated, distraught even. “ I think it’s all gone pear shaped. Please can you help.”

He passed me his Macbook and told me that it wouldn't start. It had started fine the day before but not today. What could I do to help?

So I started  trying to get it to boot into safe mode, single user mode, I reset the PRAM, all the usual stuff without success. He was sat next to me getting more and more worried so I sent him away and told him to come back again at lunch-time.

I hit Google and tried to find information about Macbooks that didn't start and just had a white screen. I read through many pages of junk and a few of interesting stuff but nothing of any use.

At one point I looked back at the Mac and it had a folder icon with a flashing question mark in it like this

It had taken a seriously long time to get to that point and I knew at that moment that things were bad for this mac! Here is the Apple Support Article

I went back to the Mac and started it from the CDROM with a system disk. It took an age to start again and I opened the disk utility to try and repair the disk. It came back with one of my favourite errors

Volume could not be repaired because of an error

A particularly useful error message that one! It was apparent that the disk was FUBAR so I called the user and told him it looked like I would have to send the offending machine off to be repaired and that he would lose his data. he asked me to find out whether it was possible for him to get his data recovered and I said it would cost and I didn't think that the IT manager would authorise it and it would probably have ot come out of his department budget. He said to find out anyway,so I called the local Apple Repair store as the Uni buys 3 year warranties with all the laptops.

They agreed with my diagnosis although I think they worded it diffferently! So we arranged to get it couriered over to them and they checked the serial number ot see if the warrranty was valid (it was) and I asked about data recovery. Oh yes they said, we can send it off to our data recovery specialists and they can analyse it for you to see if we can get your data back.

How much I said.

£125.

To get the data back?

No, just to see if they can, they will then give you a quote for hte actual retrieval. My colleague said he rememebered the last time someone had a quote it was in the region of £300 (that was after the initial analytical fee)

Thats a bit steep I said, could you just send the old disk back and I’ll give it to the user and he can go and see if someone can retrieve his data for less than that.

Sure, if you pay for the repair.

Eh?

If you pay for the repair you can have the disk back, but if you get it repaired under warranty we keep the disk.

So if I want to get the disk back to explore other options we have to pay for the repair (which I could do here although I would void the warranty) or we can get the disk replaced and the system set up for free and are only allowed to access one provider for data recovery.

Seems a bit wrong to me that they take away my users data and wont let him have it back to try and access it.

Anyway todays, yesterdays, tomorrows and every day forward the lesson is

If you do not back it up AND keep your back ups safe and check that they are ok

YOU WILL LOSE EVERYTHING

Can you risk it?

For your business?

For your photos of your babies, dogs, fish, gardens whatever

Your book, your articles, your love letters from your girlfriend

If it is important then for fecks sake

BACK IT UP