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Disrecommendation: Secure Data Recovery of Boston
So, a while back I used Secure Data Recovery of Boston to get estimates for recovery of two hard drives of mine that had failed: a 1 TB Mac backup hard disk in its own enclosure, and a Linux laptop with a hard drive with a bad partition and several other good partitions.
They offer free quotes--basically, they examine your drives and tell you how much it will be to fix them. If it's too much, they just send your computer back. They looked legit, and were endorsed by a bunch of well-known people as well as local companies.
How to get an estimate:
It was trivially easy to fill out the form on their website (1 for each hard drive), and there was a nice automated response the next day followed up with a personal email from E., the technician. But it was all downhill from there.
The process of dropping off the drives:
I didn't mind going on the train to a swanky office building in Boston to drop off my laptop and my hard drive. I thought it was somewhat funny that I was mistaken by the first-floor security folks for a bike messenger dropping off some big company's computers and asked to go around back and up the service entrance, but looking back on how my case was subsequently handled I think that maybe that was just a symptom of a larger problem.
The process of getting a firm estimate of how much my HD recovery would cost:
I got an email on 9/20 telling me an estimate was ready, and I should call E. the technician. I called him, and he told me that the estimate wasn't quit ready yet. Two days after I spoke to E. on the phone, I followed up with another email, on a Thursday. I got a reply email on Monday with one customer ID number and one price--but the next morning, early, I got a cost breakdown. Unfortunately, it was too expensive, so I asked them to send the computers back to me.
The process of getting the hard drives back:
The 1 TB hard drive was mailed back to me in a relatively straightforward fashion. Since I had my mac mini set up and didn't want to risk further damage to the laptop's HD and the backup mac drive was basically unbootable, the drives sat in storage until the middle of December, when I opened up the box and found--my 1 TB HD, its enclosure and power source, and no laptop. (I freely admit not checking the box was an error on my part, but it was not a high priority task).
I sent E. an email with my case number from the estimate, and didn't hear back. I sent E. another email a week later, after calling and speaking with T. from Customer Service, who said E. was on holiday for Christmas, but had folks checking the storeroom for my laptop. I emailed E. again in early Jan., and got a reply from him the next day stating they were still looking for my laptop. I was worried--they had my case number from their ticketing system; they knew I'd had two computers; what was there to look for? Several days later, I sent another email to E., with identifiying details of my laptop just in case. He replied back, "What is the make and model?" I rather panicked--surely they should have that information in their system, and if they didn't know the make and model of my computer, how the heck would they have known what they were supposed to be have been looking for all this time? I sent E. an email with the information he requested, and 2 days later got the following: "They are still looking for it. Based on the tech notes we only have an
external enclosure for this case. I will keep you updated." External enclosure? Case? It's a laptop; you already sent the one with the enclosure back!
At the end of January, I sent another email noting that I was getting angry and grumpy. A day later, the reply came: "They are still looking for the notebook. We will have the final answer for you today." I didn't hear a thing. I sent another email the next day. I waited. I sent another email two days later.
I got a call from Eric, who was very polite, and also said they couldn't really find my laptop in their system per se, and transferred me to someone in the sales department. I happened to mention to the salesperson that when I originally sent in the estimates, I sent in one estimate per computer, and surely those estimates were trackable in their system, even if the ticket numbers they had for me appeared to indicate that I only dropped off one computer? I heard a little typing. Salesperson asked if he could call me back within 15 m. He called me back within 5 minutes, and said they'd found my laptop, said it had a different tracking/case number that had been misfiled, and apologized and said they'd send it back.
Unboxing: I got the laptop in the mail today. I opened it up (learning from my earlier mistake) and took the hard drive mounting screw off the bottom where it had been taped, screwed it back into the laptop case, and booted it right up. I got a really low-level error basically saying, "where the heck is your hard drive? Reconnect the cable; there's no OS here." I opened up the hard drive enclosure, and found out that while my laptop had been returned to me, it was returned without the hard drive.
So, I am still not done dealing with the inconvenience this company has caused me by their incompetence and forgetfulness and lack of attention to detail; timewise, I would actually have been better off had I not taken my drives to be checked at all.
I have a dump of all the data on my hard drive, but there's so much and it's so raw that it's basically useless. I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to afford to get back some of the stuff on that borked partition, but it'd be nice to at least have the opportunity to get some stuff off the non-borked partition.
Summary: Though everyone I spoke with was unfailingly polite, it was ridiculous that I was strung along for so long and now have another problem to deal with because they forgot to check my computer had everything it came in with. If I do ever get the bags of money needed to recover my hard drive, I won't be bringing it to Secure Data Recovery of Boston, because even if they were to competently fix my hard drives, I wouldn't ever be sure of getting them back in a timely fashion.
They offer free quotes--basically, they examine your drives and tell you how much it will be to fix them. If it's too much, they just send your computer back. They looked legit, and were endorsed by a bunch of well-known people as well as local companies.
How to get an estimate:
It was trivially easy to fill out the form on their website (1 for each hard drive), and there was a nice automated response the next day followed up with a personal email from E., the technician. But it was all downhill from there.
The process of dropping off the drives:
I didn't mind going on the train to a swanky office building in Boston to drop off my laptop and my hard drive. I thought it was somewhat funny that I was mistaken by the first-floor security folks for a bike messenger dropping off some big company's computers and asked to go around back and up the service entrance, but looking back on how my case was subsequently handled I think that maybe that was just a symptom of a larger problem.
The process of getting a firm estimate of how much my HD recovery would cost:
I got an email on 9/20 telling me an estimate was ready, and I should call E. the technician. I called him, and he told me that the estimate wasn't quit ready yet. Two days after I spoke to E. on the phone, I followed up with another email, on a Thursday. I got a reply email on Monday with one customer ID number and one price--but the next morning, early, I got a cost breakdown. Unfortunately, it was too expensive, so I asked them to send the computers back to me.
The process of getting the hard drives back:
The 1 TB hard drive was mailed back to me in a relatively straightforward fashion. Since I had my mac mini set up and didn't want to risk further damage to the laptop's HD and the backup mac drive was basically unbootable, the drives sat in storage until the middle of December, when I opened up the box and found--my 1 TB HD, its enclosure and power source, and no laptop. (I freely admit not checking the box was an error on my part, but it was not a high priority task).
I sent E. an email with my case number from the estimate, and didn't hear back. I sent E. another email a week later, after calling and speaking with T. from Customer Service, who said E. was on holiday for Christmas, but had folks checking the storeroom for my laptop. I emailed E. again in early Jan., and got a reply from him the next day stating they were still looking for my laptop. I was worried--they had my case number from their ticketing system; they knew I'd had two computers; what was there to look for? Several days later, I sent another email to E., with identifiying details of my laptop just in case. He replied back, "What is the make and model?" I rather panicked--surely they should have that information in their system, and if they didn't know the make and model of my computer, how the heck would they have known what they were supposed to be have been looking for all this time? I sent E. an email with the information he requested, and 2 days later got the following: "They are still looking for it. Based on the tech notes we only have an
external enclosure for this case. I will keep you updated." External enclosure? Case? It's a laptop; you already sent the one with the enclosure back!
At the end of January, I sent another email noting that I was getting angry and grumpy. A day later, the reply came: "They are still looking for the notebook. We will have the final answer for you today." I didn't hear a thing. I sent another email the next day. I waited. I sent another email two days later.
I got a call from Eric, who was very polite, and also said they couldn't really find my laptop in their system per se, and transferred me to someone in the sales department. I happened to mention to the salesperson that when I originally sent in the estimates, I sent in one estimate per computer, and surely those estimates were trackable in their system, even if the ticket numbers they had for me appeared to indicate that I only dropped off one computer? I heard a little typing. Salesperson asked if he could call me back within 15 m. He called me back within 5 minutes, and said they'd found my laptop, said it had a different tracking/case number that had been misfiled, and apologized and said they'd send it back.
Unboxing: I got the laptop in the mail today. I opened it up (learning from my earlier mistake) and took the hard drive mounting screw off the bottom where it had been taped, screwed it back into the laptop case, and booted it right up. I got a really low-level error basically saying, "where the heck is your hard drive? Reconnect the cable; there's no OS here." I opened up the hard drive enclosure, and found out that while my laptop had been returned to me, it was returned without the hard drive.
So, I am still not done dealing with the inconvenience this company has caused me by their incompetence and forgetfulness and lack of attention to detail; timewise, I would actually have been better off had I not taken my drives to be checked at all.
I have a dump of all the data on my hard drive, but there's so much and it's so raw that it's basically useless. I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to afford to get back some of the stuff on that borked partition, but it'd be nice to at least have the opportunity to get some stuff off the non-borked partition.
Summary: Though everyone I spoke with was unfailingly polite, it was ridiculous that I was strung along for so long and now have another problem to deal with because they forgot to check my computer had everything it came in with. If I do ever get the bags of money needed to recover my hard drive, I won't be bringing it to Secure Data Recovery of Boston, because even if they were to competently fix my hard drives, I wouldn't ever be sure of getting them back in a timely fashion.
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