Every Customer, Every Time, No Excuses

It was initially my intention to write my first article about hard drive data recovery. Sometimes, though, a battle plan doesn’t survive the initial encounter. It so happens I read Tim Biden’s excellent blog post about online backup, the same day I had a situation with a client involving hard drive failure. I screwed up, and here’s what we can learn from it.

I arrived onsite to my client’s house to look at her computer, which I had set up only six months beforehand. Like all too many of my new clients, she had acquired the computer first, then contacted me after receiving it. I could write an essay on that topic alone, but suffice to say, you have to play the hand you’re dealt. This system was in very light use for six months, and I arrive to find it throwing up “SMART STATUS FAILED” messages immediately after POST.

The system would still boot to Windows, although it would become unstable after more than a few minutes of use. I installed software that could read the SMART diagnostic codes to see what kind of damage we were looking at. Unless Speedfan recently stopped reading SMART codes under Vista, I can only assume Dell has stripped SMART reporting out of their newer Inspiron 530 models. Speedfan didn’t recognize any drives to read SMART status from, and there wasn’t any option to enable/disable SMART in the BIOS. Normally, I would’ve made a backup of the drive onsite, but it was an emergency call on short notice, and my backup tools were not on hand.

When I got the system back to the shop, I was looking forward to reading the SMART status on the drive. I know the system was in light use, and when I set it up the first time, I had sold the client a UPS with automatic voltage regulation. I knew that the system wasn’t being hit by power sags or outages, so I was shocked to find that this hard drive had over 500 reallocated sectors.

The extensive amount of drive issues meant the disk imaging software kept getting read errors. I was able to get a backup made, but not one that could be cloned back with programs and settings intact. Once the new drive was installed in the computer, I’d have to go through and reinstall all of the software and reconfigure the system just like I had the first time through. Which went faster, this time, but nonetheless, the entire experience was a huge inconvenience to the client. From the time I showed up and found the drive to be failing to the time her system was back to 100%, 6 days had passed.

So what did I do wrong? Technically nothing. I reassured her through the whole process that everything was going to be fine, and she didn’t lose any data. I handled the call to Dell to get the warranty replacement arranged, saving her the headache of trying to deal with technical support without speaking their language, and Dell had a technician onsite the next day to swap in a new drive. In the end, she was understandably annoyed by the hardware failure, but happy I was there to make it as painless as possible.

The problem is, none of this was necessary. My error was one of omission, six months ago when I first set up her computer. I installed security software and taught her how to use Firefox. I helped her pick out a good printer and set it up. I pointed out that her surge strip should be replaced by a UPS, grabbed one from my van and hooked that up as well. I even set her up with Dropbox so all her basic files would be safe.

But I didn’t bother to suggest a more comprehensive backup solution. It crossed my mind, but I probably figured, “This is a new client. I don’t want her to think I’m just here to fleece her. I’ve already sold her a printer and a UPS, I should suggest a backup solution another day.”

Wrong.

Sometimes we’re guilty of being too nice, or not wanting to seem too pushy, but these are things we have to do. It’s our job to know the risks and enumerate them to those who can’t be expected to know them. Every tech knows that hard drives can fail in six years or in six months, and though the latter is less likely, it’s still possible.

All told, there were three trips back and forth to this client’s house, adding up to at least five billable hours, plus the drivetime that I had to absorb. The total bill exceeded what it would’ve cost for a proper backup system with daily differential backups. Putting aside the fact that we’d have a point to go back to with all her programs and settings intact, there’s another bonus to a good backup software. We would’ve been made aware of the hard drive issues earlier, because the backups would’ve failed with the same errors that occurred when I tried to clone the drive. Only we’d have known before the problem was extensive, could potentially repair the damaged sectors, and get one last good clone before replacing the drive.

Never curtail your recommendations because you’re afraid of overwhelming your clients. They’ll thank you when something you did saves them, and you’ll be thankful you did everything you could to keep them running smoothly.

 
Written by James Ryan Meray