Inevitable
Posted by rbultje at May 28th, 2007
A while ago, I blogged about the impossibility to have a shared agenda between multiple OSes (here, a Linux / OS X dualboot) running local tools. iCal getting slower as my calendar grows made me finally decide to move to GCal and synchronize both sides client-side. I don’t like it, but whatever, at least it works. That was last week, before my screen broke and I sent my computer off for repair to the MacStore (with my calendar still available online, yay!).
Now, I wish I’d done that with my email also, because when the computer came back 2 days later, everything was gone. I had backups of my thesis work (yes, kids, make those - TODAY), but not of my programming (this is a good test to see how much I synchronize with bugzilla / svn) or my email (GMail, here I come…), I mean, seriously, who would’ve thought they’d remove the Linux partition along with fixing the screen? It means anything I’ve ever worked on that was not in a svn/cvs somewhere is now lost. Also, patches in progress or under review no longer exist.
The helpdesk people at IBM/Lenovo told me it’s no problem to keep the hard drive safely at your own home if you have to send in your machine for repair… I’m really sorry for your data loss.
What was it with the screen? Could it possibly be that the backlight started to flicker? On a Macbook?
wtf?! I’d sue them, seriously. The time spent on lost work is expensive.
The screen was garbled, colors messed up, like a 16-color dithering output. I don’t think it was backlight-related.
To sue anyone is barely an option, since my data will never come back. It’s lost. It took me a good minute to realize that before I accepted the “repaired” laptop from the support guy.This is pretty much standard among laptop vendors as far as I can tell; and honestly I can’t really blame them. Think about how many times someone sends in a laptop saying “it doesn’t work” but really it’s infected with some windows spyware.
Gateway made it abundantly clear that if you send in the laptop with a hard drive, it will be wiped. I think Apple did too. If Lenovo didn’t you should complain.I’d probably burst into flames had they done this to me. This is crazy! Hopefully these people aren’t into surgery/medicine.
Colin: if they want to check whether it’s a software problem, they can use a live-CD, or replace the hard disk temporarily by one of their own.
I understand they can’t give a guarantee that all data on your disks will survive transport etc., but wiping a disk without any good reason is just plain vandalism.I second Wouter’s comment about IBM/Lenovo: they specifically said that I should feel free to take out and hang onto the drive, for security, privacy, and prevention of this kind of scenario.