The Adventure of My Defunct Hard Drive: Apple Wants Your Money or Your Life

[HiPointDem]

In the everyday game between man and corporation, it is taken for granted that the house always prevails. Apple’s winning streak hit a snag last week however, when I won an exception to the company’s policy governing the replacement of warrantied hard drives.

My laptop stopped working late at night Friday... I took it the next morning to a local specialist. The man behind the counter said the data was almost certainly lost, but that the drive could be swapped for a new one for no charge. On Tuesday it was confirmed that the data was gone. My only option for the wrecked drive, the specialist told me over the phone, was to send it to a company called Data Savers. For between $750 and $2,500, a man in a moon suit would sit in a sealed room and use lasers to lift whatever information he could directly from the disk. Even then, recovery wasn’t guaranteed. I couldn’t afford it, I told her, but I may have a friend who can help me privately, so I would take the drive to him instead. Impossible, the specialist responded. “Apple requires that we return all replaced drives directly to the manufacturer,” she said. Once there, my precious disk would be destroyed. I could keep it only if I paid $300 — a full $100 more than it would cost simply to buy a new drive.

This was problematic for two reasons. First, if the original item — which I already paid for — was worthless to the company, why couldn’t I keep it? Second, defunct as it was, the drive contained information that was my property, not the manufacturer’s, and some of the data pertained to sources I’d spoken to in the course of reporting and whom I’d guaranteed confidentiality. How could I keep my promise if their information was in the hands of a corporation and still theoretically retrievable? I had to reclaim it.

The specialist agreed to hold the disk until the end of the day. I thanked her. Then I called Apple customer service.... he could do nothing. “That’s just the policy,” he said. Plus, he had no authority over the manufacturer. He advised me to make backup copies of my data next time. Frustrated by the impudence of this advice, I said what seemed to be the magic words:

“I’m a journalist. In addition to containing months of irreplaceable work, the drive your company is repossessing holds sensitive information that would reveal the names of a number of confidential sources,” I said. “Those people expect their identities to remain private. Additionally, it contains personal property of mine that I’d like to remain private. These circumstances raise a number of legal liability questions involving Apple, the manufacturer, the specialist, my publisher and me. I’m happy to hear the drive would be destroyed, but I make my living being skeptical of such claims, and I couldn’t in good conscience make an exception here.”

Good news arrived thirty minutes later.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/29/apple-wants-your-money-or-your-life/

[hobbit709]

1. Apple sees its customers coming with their eyes closed and money in their hands.

[justiceischeap]

2. Funny, I'm an Apple customer and if something goes wrong with my drive

I'd replace it myself. It's not that difficult and it's much cheaper than going to a genius bar and having them do it.

[hobbit709]

3. You're in the minority there.

Of course that could said about the majority of Windows owners too. That's how I make a living-by fixing their computers.

[HiPointDem]

4. as i understand it you have to give up the old one when you get the new one.

[justiceischeap]

7. Not if I replace it myself.

If I purchase a hard drive online and have it shipped to me, how would anyone know I replaced the drive?

[HiPointDem]

8. in that case, no. i thought you meant the free replacement from apple.

[Warpy]

27. A lot of people are desperately afraid

of opening up any sort of electrical or electronic equipment. They have other skills to compensate them well enough to afford the services of the fearless.

I agree that it's a simple thing to do, but I was one of those maddening children who picked things apart to find out how they worked. I'm among the fearless, working on the floor with a bare toe hooked around the chassis so nothing gets zapped.

For others, the world is just a series of black boxes. They have no clue what makes them work, they just know enough to work them.

ETA: I've been aware of Apple's overly proprietary hardware policies for a long time. That's the second reason I've always stuck with PCs.

[Ganja Ninja]

5. I don't know about Apples but ...

When we needed to put a bigger hard drive on one of our PC computers at work I was able to buy a hard drive reader kit a Tiger direct for around $35 and a program for cloning it at office depot for $50. Of course you need another working computer to do the work of transferring the files not to mention the replacement hard drive.

[csziggy]

10. The original drive in the OP was toast - the laptop was OK

So simple drive cloning may not work. In some cases with PCs an apparently dead hard drive won't boot but when it is attached as a secondary drive, the data is accessible. I have no experience with Apple so I don't know if this is possible with the drives from their computers.

But if the circuit board for a drive is damaged, that will not work though in some cases it is possible to replace the circuit board and access the data. And if the physical drive itself is damaged the only way to recover anything is through use of one of the specialty companies with laser and sonic screw drivers and such (sorry, watching a Doctor Who marathon right now ).

[Mnpaul]

13. The hard drive in the Apple looks like a standard HD

They may have been able to clone it using the freezer trick.

[csziggy]

15. Possibly - I've done that a few times

But most of my "dead" drives just had a damaged boot sector so I could hook them up as "slave" drives and access the data just fine without freezing them or doing anything special. One, I didn't get around to unhooking for a couple of years and it worked just fine as a slave for all that time - but I didn't put any data on there that wasn't backed up elsewhere.

My very first failed hard drive was that way. The PC repair guy declared it dead and installed a new one. Ten years later when I was playing with rebuilding old computers, I found that drive and was able to recover all that data I thought had been lost just by hooking it up as something other than a master drive. Several of the old drives I messed with had to have their file systems repaired using Norton Utilities - and some of those still had data from their previous owners. If I were a crook I could have done nefarious deeds with what was still on those drives!

[Warpy]

31. The box I had in the early 00's was named the Antichrist

and that thing would do terrible things to its hard drives. I found the trick of piggybacking them to save data to work beautifully.

I never did find out why a hard drive would last only 3 months before needing everything reinstalled, which would make old data inaccessible. I figured the machine was possessed and simply swapped drives and data back and forth. It worked.

[csziggy]

37. Wasn't that the period when the mobos had the problem with the capacitors?

I had one box that never ran right from when I first built it. I reinstalled Windows many, many times, checked everything over and over and nothing ever worked right on it. I'd built it to do video and audio capture but never could keep it working long enough to get anything done. Files would get corrupted, the Windows installation was screwed up, it was not at all reliable.

It finally crapped out completely in the middle of us building our house and right after I'd had knee surgery so I had no time to do anything with it. I took it to my local computer guy. First thing he found was that every capacitor on the mobo was swollen and some were leaking nasty orange crud. So he put in a new mobo which meant a new CPU and new memory. It still wouldn't run right. He finally switched out the power supply and everything was great.

Out of curiosity he opened the power supply only to find that every capacitor inside it was also swollen, some leaking nasty orange stuff.

Yeah, the Capacitor Plague began around 2002: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

[Warpy]

39. I didn't notice anything, to tell the truth.

Once I realized swapping cheap HDs back and forth would take care of it, that was it. Interesting that it might have been leaky capacitors.

After my dad died and I could afford a better box, the Antichrist became a dedicated Linux box and survived for four more years without incident until the power coming into the house shorted and it went up in smoke.

[csziggy]

40. Some computers ran for a long time with bad capacitors

But look at the various pictures in the Wikipedia article - there are some scary failures there.

The part of the whole Capacitor Plague that got me is that it was from industrial espionage done wrong:
"A major cause of the plague of faulty capacitors was industrial espionage in connection with the theft of an electrolyte formula. A researcher is suspected of having taken, when moving from Japan to Taiwan, the secret chemical composition of a new low-resistance, inexpensive, water-containing electrolyte. The researcher subsequently tried to imitate this electrolyte formula in Taiwan, to undersell the pricing of the Japanese manufacturers. However, the secret formula had apparently been copied incompletely, and it lacked important proprietary ingredients which were essential to the long-term stability of the capacitors."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague#Industrial_espionage_implicated

[Warpy]

45. The only symptom mine ever had was borked Windows

No BSOD, no funny starts and stops, just borked Windows. It was weird beyond belief.

There were no visibly bulging capacitor tops and certainly no brown goo, but if the power surge hadn't toasted it, that was probably next.

Funny, it never ate Linux. It just hated Windows.

[Ganja Ninja]

16. Maybe it was toast and maybe not.

I've had IT guys tell me a hard drive was bad when all that was wrong was Windows was corrupted.

[csziggy]

18. Since I've never taken a computer to a commercial IT guy

I don't know about that possibility. I've used small local shops or done the repairs myself. The local shop I use now is run by a guy who might be comfortable here, but he gave up on the Florida Democratic Party years ago is now registered independent. I trust him implicitly - the first time I ever had him upgrade a computer for me, he insisted I watch him do it so I could learn how easy it was to actually work on a computer.

I would guess it is easier for an IT guy to drop in a new drive and image a new copy of Windows rather than troubleshoot a corrupted installation that could have malware or a virus infestation.

[RedstDem]

6. first mistake was obviously buying a mac

I've had three hard drives go bad on my pro since i purchased it in early 2010.
all service performed by certified apple geeks.

that's THREE.....

my old Sony which it replaced was handed off to a novice user, was three years older and is still on drive number one.

never again apple...
fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice.....uh
you can't get fooled again!!

[Mnpaul]

14. Wow 3 drives failed

It sounds like there might be a design problem. That slim design may look nice but the hard drive may not be getting enough cooling. I don't think that I have had three drives fail in all of the computers I have had since '98. I think I have had only two fail and one of those was from moisture that got on a drive.

[UnrepentantLiberal]

9. He should have just done this.

[Apophis]

11. Customers = money to Apple and that's it.

[KittyWampus]

46. Do customers equal anything else to any other computer manufacturer?

[Apophis]

49. No.

What's your point?

[Sgent]

12. This is standard

with any hard drive warranty I'm familiar with. If nothing else, returning the hard drive to the manufacturer allows them to do research as to what broke.

Business class computer warrenty's usually don't have this requirement, but every consumer drive I've dealt with does.

[L0oniX]

17. I find no acceptable excuse for not backing up vital info.

Flash drives are the standard for backup ...and DVDR. I use both. Are you also going to blame the virus makers too or use anti virus protection?

[Orrex]

20. You're right--backing up the data would have protected the author's confidential sources

Good thinking!

[L0oniX]

21. Placing confidential sources "only" on a flash drive is an option. n/t

[Orrex]

23. If you're hoping to minimize data security, sure

You're proposing that the journalist keep his confidential information on flash drives and also, presumably to back up that information on other flash drives. That seems like a terrific vulnerability, and in any case it doesn't address the preposterous underlying issue of Apple reposessing its customers' hard drives for no good reason.

[frylock]

25. we use Bitlocker to encrypt jump drives in the Windows world

[Orrex]

30. That's nice and still largely irrelevant

Since it doesn't address Apple's idiotic policy. You're saying that Apple's nonsense about repossessing users' hard drives is justified because this user didn't back up his files to your satisfaction.

In addition, it's a lot easier to misplace a flash drive than a laptop.

[frylock]

32. i never said that. i merely addressed your concerns regarding data security on portable drives..

I build my own systems, so it never would've occurred to me to take an HDD back to the vendor without first attempting to recover my data.

[Orrex]

35. Whoops--sorry. Conflated two separate DUers there!

Also, the article indicated that the data might be partially retrieved through a complex and hugely expensive process, so I gathered that the author had already made an attempt at recovery.

[KittyWampus]

33. the times I've ever had things replaced by manufacturer's always meant handing over the dead item

I suspect all computer companies would have similar policies.

And if this information was so confidential one wonders why it wasn't encrypted.

[Orrex]

34. That's lovely hindsight

If a device is repaired under warranty and at no charge, then I can see why the company might want to reclaim the original. But if they're charging for the repair (as I believe was the case here) they shouldn't also get to keep the equipment.

And in any case, you're still blaming the customer for the company's dumbass policy, so whether or not the drive was encrypted is irrelevant. He owned the data. He owned the hard drive. Apple decided that it would repossess both simply because it's Apple.

[KG]

19. his lack of back-up discipline isn't a hardware company's problem.

jump-drives are dirt cheap. seems Apple did okay by him in the end.

[sofa king]

22. I guess the no-backup is a security measure?

No copies means one primary way to acquire that information--by stealing or breaking into the backup--is denied to those who wish to acquire it.

The flip-side to that is the total loss of the information should the device on which the information resides do what it is quite literally designed to do: fail. So it doesn't seem like a very good option.

I can't wait to see what the courts do with cloud-based backups and the inevitable "backup spyware" that will lift copies of your information without your overt knowledge or consent. That could be a total nightmare.

It seems to me that confidentiality itself is on the verge of being "owned" by someone entirely different from the people who think they are engaging in it.

[MineralMan]

48. Indeed. I just bought three 16 GB USB

thumb drives for $9.99 each at Walgreens. Who'd have thought it.

Cheap backup capabilities. I use thumbdrives constantly, and back up daily on current projects. I also back up to the cloud, encrypted via my email account. I'm not about to rewrite a day's worth of work for any reason. That won't happen. I hate rewriting stuff.

[Phillip McCleod]

24. yep scams abound.

not just apple either. that $750-2500 for the hdd manufacturer to even *look* for your data? chances are if most techs weren't glorified salespeople your data could've been saved in an afternoon. i'd'a probably charged to $80.

testdisk works wonders.. or photorec in a pinch. just pull the old drive, pop it in a sata-usb adapter (or in a tower on an extra sata cable) boot up *Linux* and run 'sudo testdisk /dev/sdX' where 'sdX' is the device number of the sata-usb adapter.

so for i've never failed to recover *all* data.. even when every operating system and even testdisk says 'no filesystem found' or the like. even when it takes six hours to find the partition and it's riddled by bad sectors and read errors, testdisk can still generally save your hash. even if you accidentally wipe out your partition. it will find it, and let you copy data out.

like i said testdisk's never failed me even if it's not the easiest program to use it actually *works* when you run it on Linux and work on the HDD from 'outside'. never tried the mac and windows versions of testdisk but i hear they work too, though i can't imagine they work as well.

[Occulus]

28. Hey, Phil, they were referring to a process that requires a clean room.

They have to physically disassemble the hard drive, remove the disks one by one, and then try to extract the data. It's a long process, as I understand it, and many things can go wrong. Plus, no guaranteed data recovery. Just an attempt.

I'm familiar with testdisk, but this sounds more like it was a board failure or a frozen/failed bearing. Nothing can be done short of the $$$ solution.

[Phillip McCleod]

29. i'm just saying that not every tech is the same.

what one tech calls a 'dead drive, send it in' another tech calls an afternoon's work.

it happens.. sometimes the host operating system won't see a failing drive and the tech just throws their hands up because the easy thing didn't work. it happens is all. making it worse in this situation, by taking it to apple the OP is got all entangled with their corporate bullshit.

it's not likely that an apple tech is going to make any effort at data recovery using anything but mac os x.

[politicat]

44. He had click of death.

I've gotten lucky twice when I've had HDs fail with the click, and it turned out to be a blown power supply in an external drive instead of a read arm failure or a logic board blowout, but I've also had actual dead drives happen. In a laptop drive, diagnosing failure is tough at the best of times. If it's logic board, then it can be refurb'ed with a replacement logic board, but that takes a clean room. If it's a read arm bearing, then at least one platter is probably borked.

Software can sometimes recover data, but no guarantees. Thus, the high price.

(Note: LaCie external drives used to be gold standard, but their power supplies have turned to teh suck. On the hard drive side, we've lost two Toshibas, a Western Digital and a Samsung over the years. We've also replaced a number of friends' drives, of every brand. There is no good brand, there is only this brand.)

[Initech]

26. Buy a 1TB external hard drive for backups. Do a full backup once a month. Crisis solved.

No way in hell am I paying $750 for data restoration. Apple can kiss my ass if that's what they want.

[Art_from_Ark]

41. External hard drives are great for backing up hard disks.

Excellent suggestion.

[northoftheborder]

36. A total tech dummy here has a dumb question:

The last time I got rid of an old computer (I had already transferred some data off, it wasn't completely dead, just nearly) I used a huge magnet which I repeatedly ran across and up and down the outside of the drive, hoping to completely ruin any data which might be gotten off of it. I had also already supposedly deleted manually stuff off there. Did the magnet trick work?

[MineralMan]

38. Well, I am a writer too. I always have

Proprietary info on my PC. Depending on my contract with clients, that info is encrypted or not. But what it always is, along with my work product, is backed up in multiple forms. It is on thumb drives, stored on the client's server, and stored in other ways. Redundant backups always.

Professional work deserves professional treatment.

[Hekate]

42. That is disturbing. I'm a loyal Apple customer, but ...

... this is kind of disturbing.

As with so many of us who are loyal customers, it was the intuitive nature of the user interface that pulled me in, back when PCs were all the rage in offices, and clunky and hard to use. Black screens with goldenrod letters -- ugh. After I learned word processing on an Apple about 1990, I never looked back. Bought one for myself, and the rest is "you can't transfer these files to a PC" history.

I guess the old saying that a hard drive crash is never a question of "if" but "when" and you should back up your files frequently.

Also, my husband, who is a computer professional, never junks equipment without making every effort to wipe the hard drive clean of data.

[politicat]

43. Sorry about the data loss (truly) but... It was warranty service.

Yes, the owner purchased the computer, including the hard drive.

But ya know, I bought a car, including all of the components. When the AC compressor failed prematurely and it was replaced under warranty, I didn't get to keep the old compressor. That's how warranty works.

I am truly sympathetic on losing data, because I've had it happen (on PCs, which is why I've been an Apple user for years now.) It can happen on any hard drive, under any OS -- these days, all computer companies use standard drives from Toshiba, Samsung or Western Digital. However, the documentation that comes with every computer says to back up the machine. Every "For Dummies" book, every Intro to Computing class starts with regular backups. (If somebody is worried about backups being stolen, encryption takes 2 clicks and typing a password twice, and comes free with every OS.)

It is not Apple's fault, nor was it HP's fault in my case, that the user failed to RTFM. Some lessons get learned the hard way. Data recovery is tough, thus expensive.

Hard drives fail. If he was getting click of death, he'd probably been getting it for at least a few days if not weeks. It is vanishingly rare for a hard drive to keel over without at least a little warning. That click is the check engine light coming on -- machine goes to shop now, not when the round-tuit appears.

The author doth project his own error -- rather than kicking himself for being a problem between the keyboard and the chair, he's kicking the dog.

[DirkGently]

47. Nonsense Apple Bash. Why would you expect to keep the old drive?

Your hard drive goes down with no backup, and you don't understand why the return policy default is that you exchange it for a new one?

I get the frustration at the overall situation, and glad it was able to be fixed, but the actual problem here is that you didn't back up a hard drive, which is a device that is known to fail. As a professional journalist, that's incredibly careless, to the point of ineptitude. AND in the end Apple accommodated your special needs anyway?

Do have any experience or information suggesting Acer or Dell or Sony would have handled this better?

Sorry, but this comes off as just another bullshit Apple bash.