Reader Robert’s Dell XPS died. Under warranty, a Dell technician came to his house and in the process of “fixing” his computer decided to hook up and format his backup external hard drive, thus deleting 3 years worth of his work. Dell admits that they formatted his external drive but all they have to say to Robert is “Welcome to Dell.” Robert’s letter and timeline, inside…
April 7th – Top-of-the-line XPS Computer dies. Last words – “Hard drive failure.” Fortunately for me, I have the Dell Super Duper You-Should-Never-Have-to-Worry-or-Suffer-Needlessly extended warranty plan. I feel confident in the personal guaranty I get from Dell.
April 8th – Called Dell support and say that the computer fails to boot. “I think it is hard drive failure, because the computer gasped with its dying breath, ‘Hard drive failure.’”
Dell’s response: “We think it is a Windows issue. Reinstall Windows and it will work fine.” It does not.
April 9th – Marathon SIX HOUR call with Dell support during which time we uninstall and reinstall Windows, erase and replace the BIOS, unpartition and repartition the hard drives (several times), and perform all manner of terrible remedies to the computer in hopes of reviving it. None work.
Before we begin applying the electronic version of leeches to the XPS, the Dell support person asks, “We will have to erase the hard drive, is that ok?”
“No problem,” say I. “I have all my information backed up on this external hard drive. As long as no one touches the external hard drive*, everything will be fine.”
“I think it is the motherboard,” says Dell support eventually. “We will send a technician out. You should receive a call from the technician within 48 hours.”
The technician never calls. *ominous foreshadowing
April 10th through April 17th – Wait for technician to call. Emailed Dell Support several times with issue number and nice little note asking about the technician call. None of the emails responded to.
Used Dell Support Chat a couple of times from work and get runaround about how much they want to help, but unless I am sitting by the broken computer, pulling my hair our in frustration when they ask me to reinstall Windows one more time, there really isn’t anything they can do.
April 18th – Talk to Dell support chat on my laptop while sitting in front of my broken computer. Dell says, “Oh, you are using the wrong Windows installation disc, the wrong Dell support disc, and the wrong Dell diagnostic disc. We will send you the right ones.” They send me the wrong ones.
Specifically, they send me the Dell diagnostic discs for their bottom-tier laptops instead of their top-tier XPS desk tops so none of the drivers on the disc work. AND Dell sends a French-language Windows installer disc, apparently because they want to reward me by giving me the opportunity to learn a new language.
May 9th – Long, involved, multi-hour chat session with Dell support. Dell support person says that yes indeed , they sent the wrong discs and they can try to send the right discs again to me.
Logic dictates that if they just try enough times, eventually they might correctly address my problem once, right? Sadly, I am past the point of logic.
I express a level of frustration and contempt that gets me transferred to a supervisor. Dell supervisor tells me that I might have been right after all and that it probably isn’t a software issue. They agree to send out a technician.
May 13th - Dell technician comes out to the house. (I was at work and my wife was supervising the technician. He assured her several times, “I know what I’m doing.”) Doesn’t replace hard dives properly. Somehow, my 300GB hard drives gets magically replaced with a 150GB hard drive.
Also, the technician decides to plug in the external hard drive, the one I use as a backup into the computer and format it.
Apparently Dell technicians are NOT trained on the fact that FORMATTING A BACKUP DRIVE DESTROYS ALL OF THE BACKUP DATA ON IT.
May 16th – Dell support tells me that, yes, a Dell technician came into my house and effectively deleted about three years’ worth of data. All the personal data. All the professional data. All of those iTunes files I paid for and backed up so that money wouldn’t be wasted.
Everything. Now gone.
But somehow, thanks to the power of corporate magic Dell is not really responsible for this. They owe me nothing for my time and my grief and while they are very sorry for the fact I am effectively up the creek without a paddle, AND while they pretty much admit that they pointed me to this particular creek and then stole my paddle, I’m really on my own here.
So… um… that’s my customer experience with Dell. I drop a large chunk of change and buy their top-tier computer and then pay extra for their top-tier customer and technical support and am rewarded by having my external back up hard drive erased.
Thank you Dell for taking all my money and then repeatedly kicking me in the virtual nutsack because it amuses you so. Thank you Dell for making me angry enough to blog about what a craptacular waste of time and money your entire support network is.
But mostly Dell, thank you for giving me a story to share with each and every person I know who comes to me and asks what kind of computer they should buy. Because I plan on sharing this story with as many people as possible for years to come.
Wow. As if we needed another reason to hate Dell, we can’t imagine why the tech would mount an external hard drive and format it with blatant disregard to its contents. We’re not sure what all of your lost time and data is worth, Robert, but we would really like to see Dell try to make this right.
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I’m not going to blame Robert here and feel that Dell should have to pay for data recovery services – though the only way to convince Dell may be to get a court to tell them that.
However, this does bring up the need to have all REALLY important data backed up in MULTIPLE LOCATIONS – for the unlikely but possible case where a tree, flood, fire or Dell technician destroys all of your carefully maintained but co-located backups. There are so many internet services that allow this now for low or no cost that there really isn’t any reason to do it – most are easy to use and do their thing automatically in the background. If you are concerned about data security just encrypt it first on your end.
@darkrose: You are missing something. The average user shouldn’t have to worry about an idiot tech plugging in an unconnected external drive and formatting it for no reason. Should he have backed up to dvd as well? maybe, but it doesn’t change the fact that the tech was an moron.
You sound pretty knowledgeable so let me ask you, would it occur to you at all to format someone’s external drive to fix an internal drive error? Why did the tech even plug it in?
@DoubleEcho: darkrose, that’s a nice backup system, but I doubt the average user is going to know how to do shell scripting and set up cron jobs. It’s simple for you, but you have to admit that your process isn’t easy to put in place for most people.
I’m not saying it is, the point I’m trying to illustrate is that if it’s really super-duper OMG important, then it should be backed up in multiple locations. I mean geez, I can get a 1 or 2 gb thumb drive basically for free these days. I can use any number of the free photo hosting places to save my personal pictures. Most of the other garbage I can live without.
There’s also some places that give away space (for free) for doing backups. As much as I hate Symantec, they have a nice backup service that does just that although I think you have to pay for more space, or it’s free for a while and then costs money.
I’m not saying that the dell tech was right, or that the OP was wrong, just that you would think that if it’s that important it would be made as multiple backups (don’t get me started about how I’ve managed to have a drive fail, install a backup and have the backup hard disk fail..or back when I was using tape, have the drive eat a tape screwing up my whole backup set).
@darkrose: You may want to read the arguements about how RAID is not a worthwhile backup plan here and here and here to start with.
Just to add to the list of backup suggestions that is growing here, I’ll describe mine. Keep in mind, that I do not run an official business, but I do sidejobs for cash which involve storing data for website design, etc.
Every weekend, I backup anything I don’t want to live without, to an external harddrive. The harddrive is not plugged in our used otherwise. After said backup, I randomly choose a couple files to open from the backup to verify that there is no damage. Then, the first weekend of every month, I burn said backup to a DVD-R and again do a random file check. I keep the burned DVDs in my fire/waterproof safe.
My mom is like most typical computer users and only knows what she knows and is not a techy. So for her, I signed her up for Mozy.com and installed/configured their software on her machines.
One copy is just that – a copy.
Two copies stored in different locations – now that’s a backup.
you have to understand that Dell uses Onforce to supply local techs. This means any monkey who can sign up on a website online and pass some open-book dell tests can accept the work order to be paid very little.
it’s sad really…
I wouldn’t be able to control myself if that was me.
I swear I’d buy adult diapers, get in my car and drive to whichever hellhole Dell has its HQ at.
try burning 130GB of Multimedia files to DVD weekly/monthly/annually. Besides, DVDs degrade with time…I hope you are planning on “refreshing your copy” every 5-10 years….
multiple hard drives and a service like Mozy/Coppermine/iDrive/etc… are the best way to go. But let’s face it…nothing is 100%.
I do the backup to external drive every night, then copy that drive to a 2nd/3rd external drive on the weekend. I then run that drive to the safe box, get the previous week’s external and bring it home for the next weekend’s job. …so i have a data drive, and 2 external backup drives…and coppermine. …and a NAS where I do occasional backups for versioning purposes.
…I guess I do a lot of backing up, but i don’t want to be in the situation where this guy is…
@DoubleEcho: Second that suggestion. GetDataBack and other software from the same company are great. Well worth the money. They may not get you 100% of the files, but they get pretty close.
I highly recommend GetDataBack. It’s cheap, and it works well recovering deleted or formatted data. I saved a coworkers crashed drive just last week.
And no, I’m not a paid spokesperson!
[www.runtime.org]
Welcome to Hell, the world 2nd largest computer breaker in the world……
Its actually against Dell policy to do such things without the customer (who’s name is on the account) being there. Erasing personal data is a big no-no. I’ve seen people not only get complete upgrades for such a mistake, but get Dell to pay for the Data-recovery process.
This is even more the case, since the Tech formatted your external. Which is another no-no. Its not a dell-branded piece of hardware (or in a dell-branded piece of hardware), they cant touch it without account holder consent.
So all in all, the Dell Tech over-stepped Dell policy on on-site part replacement/troubleshooting, erased personal data without account holder consent, and are very, very, very responsible for this.
@heavylee-again:
Hmm… it is true that RAID is not a backup solution. But this only refutes the idea that RAID is in and of itself a backup solution. If machine A needs to have all of its data backed up and some sysadmin decides that the way to do this is only to add RAID to machine A, then that’s a problem because it does not protect against stupid mistakes. If the user accidentally deletes 1GB of data, then that data is lost. RAID won’t help recover the data.
However, RAID has its place in a backup solution. Its place is on the server which holds the backups. If you are backing up workstation data to one server disk, then you expose your backups to the risk of hard disk failure. If you use RAID to replicate your backup disk onto another disk, then the two disks would have to fail before your backup fails. I think darkrose is doing it this way: the workstation data is backed up on a server which uses RAID to minimize the risk of the backed up data being unrecoverable due to disk failure. So RAID is not the entire backup solution but has an important role to play.
(NB: while I think darkrose’s usage of RAID is sound, I don’t agree with darkrose’s criticism of the OP. And I think, as others pointed out, that the solution proposed by darkrose is beyond the technical grasp of most users.)
Dell should pay for the recovery, plain and simple. It probably would cost them next to nothing since Dell likely has some sort of data recovery team in house. That is, unless the tech did extensive formatting and wasted the data or something.
@lemur:
Valid points. But darkrose’s description of his backup routine only included backup to optical media once a year. Otherwise, everything is on the RAID. Secondly, RAID has no positive gain from corrupted data.
I have two words: “data recovery”
I have five more words: “sue them” in “small claims court”
Them = Local Service Company (often times Unisys) and Dell
Recovering that hard drive will cost about $2000. Those are your immediate damages. Are there any additional damages (time off from work, time spent recreating data for a client, etc.).
Despite the contract you have with Dell Unisys (or whoever the service provider is) cannot come into your house and damage your possessions. This is NO different from a tech coming into your house and knocking a vase off of a table. If that happened, you could recover damages equal to the replacement value of the vase. Just because you have a support contract with Dell does not give anyone the authority to damage unrelated items in your home. Would the tech be allowed to lobotomize an HP laptop in your living rooms? Can they totally destroy the camera sitting in your kitchen? Absolutely not. He laid his hands on an unrelated item and essentially destroyed it.
I would not treat this item as a part of your computer, but as part of your home. The part he was specifically told not to touch.
This is a slam dunk in court NO MATTER WHAT THE LAW. Controversial, I know, but probably true.
Seriously.
I would sue Dell at the same time. This will bring pressure on the local tech company from Dell to settle. The local tech company may even lose the ability to service Dell boxes–or their fear of such a loss will encourage them to settle.
$2000 (money for the data recovery) is where I would start (it should cover immediate damages) but I would probably sue them for the maximum possible under small claims court in your state (sometimes as high as $10,000) to ‘get their attention.’
Richard
Obviously, the OP needs to contact Dell and see what they offer as recompense. If he hits a brick wall, I would suggest a small claims court suit or an EECB.
If the OP Is feeling a little more vindictive — wasn’t there a post just a few weeks ago about crafting a letter to the company’s competitor, detailing the situation, and offering to become the competitor’s spokesperson – then sending the letter to the original company’s (e.g. Dell in this case) CEO and saying, “I want this fixed, or I’m going to become the Subway Jared for Macintosh and you will look very, very silly.”
But that’s only after he tries the usual methods of getting things fixed.
it looks like someone from Dell (assuming “Brad” is real) has made an attempt to contact the OP about the problem on his personal blog.
…hopefully Dell is going to do the right thing.
IANAL, but this definitely sounds like a litigable offense. Sue them.
Erase the bios? Um… no?
Also dells main problem with technicians that come to your house is they higher contractors, thus Dell doesn’t over see them. And the Contractors pay the techs $30 a job, no matter how long it takes and they only get paid for mileage if it’s over 15 miles from the previous place they went. So really they have no incentive to work extra hard to get your job done properly.
Weird, I never had a problem with Dell support, but then again I was a corporate gold customer. We had 20 or 25 Optiplex machines for sales people at a BMW dealership. They had a known issue with bad capacitors on the motherboards and as they failed Dell sent someone on site to replace them. They even continued support of these machines past the warranty date.
I also had 2 machines lose their power supplies and one bad hard drive. All replaced quickly and professionally.
@heavylee-again: Valid points. But darkrose’s description of his backup routine only included backup to optical media once a year. Otherwise, everything is on the RAID. Secondly, RAID has no positive gain from corrupted data.
No, it works like this:
Data type 1: Stuff I don’t really care about (MP3/pr0n/movie images/MythTV videos/OS images, etc): RAID mirror.
Data type 2: Stuff I care about (personal documents such as medical records, birth certificates, extremely important applications, etc): Book drive.
Data type 3: Stuff I absolutely cannot live without (personal documents, as described above, tax records): Backed up 1x a year to optical disk right after I complete tax return for the year (rarely the only thing that changes in this list aside from medical documents but we’ve been fortunate to not have any major medical issues this year so far). Optical disk sent to storage in a fireproof safe.
So basically Data type 3 gets backed up 3 times. It lives in the mirror, lives on the book drive, and lives in the backup. Data type 2 gets backed up twice (RAID & book) and data type 1 gets backed up once (RAID).
Now I know RAID in itself isn’t a backup solution but it has saved my hiney in the past when a disk goes bad. I know how to recover when I screw up a file or delete it, so it’s not a problem. I am trying to protect against physical failure, NOT accidentally deleting. Accidentally deleting is covered by backup methods 2 and 3 (btw I use rsync for syncing to book drive so I only back up if the doc has changed *AND* I also rename rather than overwrite..and I *NEVER* delete. The book drive stuff rarely changes, so I’m not too worried about it.
I have 700GB worth of data, but only maybe 100gb that would be inconvenient to get again (but could still be obtained) and of that, maybe 2gb that is absolutely irreplaceable. I don’t back EVERYTHING up beyond mirroring.
The problem I have with OP is that if these files are so valuable, I don’t think I’d have just 1 backup copy. As many including myself has said, there are a number of free and low cost services out there to help with the backup process. Hell, you can buy a CD-RW disc for what.. a buck? Buck fifty? I also pointed out thumb drives, they are dirt cheap now–and some of them have write protect tabs on them (still), so that’s an option as well. I don’t really see how someone could personally have more than 1 or 2 gigs of absolutely can’t-live-without stuff (except maybe photos–but again, free gallery services!). I might be wrong but I consider myself a data packrat..so I don’t know.
No backup plan is 100% foolproof but slapping something on a book drive and expecting it to be there is kind of not exactly the best idea. What if the drive falls off the desk and shatters or it busts the drive head on the platter?
@cabalist: This is a slam dunk in court NO MATTER WHAT THE LAW. Controversial, I know, but probably true.
“DELL DOES NOT ACCEPT LIABILITY BEYOND THE REMEDIES PROVIDED FOR IN THIS LIMITED WARRANTY STATEMENT OR FOR SPECIAL, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY LIABILTY FOR THIRD PARTY CLAIMS AGAINST YOU FOR DAMAGES, FOR PRODUCTS NOT BEING AVAILABLE FOR USE, OR FOR LOST DATA OR LOST SOFTWARE. DELL’S LIABILITY WILL BE NO MORE THAN THE AMOUNT YOU PAID FOR THE PRODUCT THAT IS THE SUBJECT OF A CLAIM. THIS IS THE MAXIMUM AMOUNT FOR WHICH DELL IS RESPONSIBLE.”
Most “support contracts” indemnify the company providing the support from any damaged related to them farking something up. I know my company does this because if one of our techs tells a customer to delete a hive from the registry and the user bunks it up and deletes his entire registry and subsequently has to reinstall Windows and lose his data, that’s not our fault.
It certainly wouldn’t be slam-dunk, as EULAs have been challenged before and as long as the click-thru was done before the sale (IIRC, the Dell purchasing process does this as part of the confirmation), it is enforceable. So basically OP might get reimbursed for data recovery service, but that’s about it.
As for the possibility of legal liability for Dell and the tech, I have no legal education so I can’t speculate on what would happen if there was a court case. But, to me, a support contract that would protect a company from liability if the customer does not execute instructions properly is a LOT more reasonable than a contract that says ‘we are not responsible for what we did’.
Unless the Dell technician also zeroed the hard drive. it should be possible to recover the data from it even though it was formatted. Not that that makes Dell suck any less, I’m just saying they guy should check it out.
I would have said F-U the moment he even ASKED to see my external backup drive!
well, i just bought a dell vestro like 2 months ago, already it is giving me problem when playing world of warcraft. it says something about video card driver problem, i am afraid to call dell. since i can still play the game and the error only pops up sometimes and do nothing, i’ll just keep it that way.
Years ago (1999), I had a drive fail in a dell desktop. Under warranty, I called support. I told them the drive was broken. They had me do 2 minutes of fiddling and then they confirmed what I told them. Offering to send out a tech, I declined and just asked for the drive. It arrived the next day. I installed it and was on my way. One of the greatest customer service experiences of my life.
Doubtful that would happen again with what I have heard recently.
let it be noted – always keep an eye on a tech/contractor when they are in your house. I always ask the comcast techs to tell me what to do, rather then let them do it. Any those cds that comcast gives you with a new cable modem? you don’t need it. all it does is change the blue E icon in internet explorer to a comcast logo and crap like that.
Note to Evil Dell Technician #09512:
If you want to mess with your customers, remember formatting doesn’t completely get rid of the data, you need something more powerful like D-Ban that writes junk data to the drive and then reformats it, going through that cycle 3 times to virtually guarantee the data is gone. Otherwise, the customer can probably spend over a $1000 and get the data back, wasting all your hard spent time trying to destroy their data.
On a side note, cross reference your job with the phone support. Be very specific that they mention when trying to help the customer that it’s NOT Dell’s fault the customer lost his “important” data and that the customer should have backed up their data preferably on a Dell external hard drive (try to sell them a back up drive at this point). Then wait for the sure fire hilarity of a customer finally snapping and going from a normal human being into a babbling tourettes screaming psychosis.
Signed: Evil Dell Technician #12576
Dell did something similar to me – I had a computer that just kept getting corrupt Windows installs and wouldn’t boot into windows. So I was told we would need to repartition my harddrive – without being told that this would, in the end, take all my data and flush it down the toilet. Way to go Dell! And of course they refused to do a damn thing after the fact. Haven’t bought a thing from them since (except that 1.5 TB drive for 67 dollars. Or 8 of them. *cough*)
“Hmm, the computer won’t boot. It must be the fault of that pesky external HDD sitting over there not currently connected to the computer. If I just connect it and reformat it, the problem should just go away…”
Seriously, why anyone is still buying desktops from Dell is beyond me. Pay the high school kid down the street $100 to build you one from scratch with the parts you want and you’re done.
Because of this crap I dont buy dell. Cant do the same at work, but they just changed to HP. (started twitching when I heard)
I’ve stayed with IBM (OK, OK now lenovo) and had no issues with them.
My personal T61 is consistently outperforming the Dell precision m4300 they gave me.
Dell is liable for this. The tech had NO REASON to touch the external hard drive. The problem was with the machine, not the external hard-drive.
Use professional data recovery, and re-buy what you must. How much did that cost? Okay, now take that amount and DOUBLE it. Now add a zero to the end. Finally, add how much the computer system, warranty, court fees, etc cost.
Easily $20,000+
Note: I am writing this on a Dell CPU. But I won’t make that mistake (buying Dell) again. But I resolved that years ago.
First off, I have a Mac. They’ll never be sending a tech out, because I have to cart the dang thing in. Secondly: I will always hide my backup from now on, just because of this story.
Why in the hell would someone format an external hard drive. I don’t even like to look at someone else’s external, because I know if you’re smart enough to have a back up it must be important.
Lastly, how do you not drive to this person’s house and beat them senseless with the CPU of their own computer? Things like this make me want to call my uncle Vinnie who knows a guy.
I’m mad and this didn’t even happen to me. *shudder*
Try this tactic Robert, first off, ask yourself if you think all the information on your computer, and the computer itself/time/aggravation/stress/possible health issues this caused is worth about $15,000-$20,000. Next, sue them for one of these figures. $15k-$20k is virtually nothing to a Dell higher up. They may spend this amount to take a limo from one state to another, simply because their pets get scared on an airplane. They will probably throw this money at you to get you to go away, just so they won’t have to show up in court. My deepest sympathies for having to deal with such poor service Robert, but remember, Mr. Dell didn’t become a billionaire by making people’s dreams happen.
@darkrose: “DELL DOES NOT ACCEPT LIABILITY BEYOND THE REMEDIES PROVIDED FOR IN THIS LIMITED WARRANTY STATEMENT OR FOR SPECIAL, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY LIABILTY FOR THIRD PARTY CLAIMS AGAINST YOU FOR DAMAGES, FOR PRODUCTS NOT BEING AVAILABLE FOR USE, OR FOR LOST DATA OR LOST SOFTWARE. DELL’S LIABILITY WILL BE NO MORE THAN THE AMOUNT YOU PAID FOR THE PRODUCT THAT IS THE SUBJECT OF A CLAIM. THIS IS THE MAXIMUM AMOUNT FOR WHICH DELL IS RESPONSIBLE.”
Are you serious? Honestly, you think that ^^^^ applies in this situation? The external hard-drive had nothing to do with the service call.
Example: I have a dell laptop. It won’t connect to the internet. Physically or wirelessly. I have music, photos, documents, professional software worth $500. I also have all of it backed up on my desktop.
If the tech DELETES EVERYTHING from the laptop, I have very little recourse. But if he touched the desktop there would be hell (and a lot of money) to pay.
My point exactly.
The agreement between the user and Dell only covers the equipment that was bought, at that time (that particular transaction), and specifically part of the support contract, from Dell. Just because this is a hard drive (ie a technology item) does not mean that Dell is absolved. They can no more come into your house and damage an unrelated hard drive, not connected in any way to the PC they have insured, then they can come into your living room and tune your new TV with a baseball bat while they are fixing your new latitude.
Just because the item they destroyed was a hard drive, and they happen to sell hard drives, does not mean that the support contract ON ANOTHER UNRELATED ITEM would protect them from a lawsuit.
I’d say IMO that the best way to recover data ‘formatted’ over (and that would include mp3′s and whatnot) is GetDataBackFor___ (where ___ is either FAT (for FAT12/16/32 systems) or NTFS (for NTFS formatted systems).
Sincerely,
Jonathan Herr