Western Digital Hard Drive failed. What are my options?

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johnr

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#989317 17-Feb-2014 22:49

tdgeek:
richms: Flash drives are terrible backups, as they are modifiable so people will usually back up over the top of the old ones.

What do you mean my modifiable?

Anyone can pick it up plug it in and load some donkey pictures onto it,

richms

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#989321 17-Feb-2014 22:53

You are replacing an old backup with another one, whereas with dvd-r you are making a new backup each time so can go back to older versions of files, for example to before some idiot decided to resize all your images down to make them fit on facebook or similar. If you just back up to flashdrive and replace the lot each time, by the time you notice it may be too late if all your backup sticks have been overwritten with the mangled files.

Richard rich.ms

tdgeek

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#989324 17-Feb-2014 23:05

richms: You are replacing an old backup with another one, whereas with dvd-r you are making a new backup each time so can go back to older versions of files, for example to before some idiot decided to resize all your images down to make them fit on facebook or similar. If you just back up to flashdrive and replace the lot each time, by the time you notice it may be too late if all your backup sticks have been overwritten with the mangled files.

Understood, I should have been less vague. My post was for those that cannot understand stuff, hence they would be shown how to backup in Windows Explorer, and use more than one backup device, rename the backed up folder, this is how you rename, etc. Keeping it simple but not giving them one backup device and leaving them to it.

Lias

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#989528 18-Feb-2014 11:00

PaulZA: Hi guys, I'm actually posting this on behalf of my neighbour. She gave me a Western Digital 500gb, that a technician had removed, and said it had important files, and she'd like me to try to recover it, the HDD failed, (It's in it's warranty period too), and instead of the guy who replaced it, repair/replace the HDD, under the Western Digital warranty, he went and he sold her a whole brand new HDD, and told her something along the lines of "Look, we can't recover the data, but here, take your old HDD back, and we'll charge the full price for a new HDD, and the data is unrecoverable" I'm considering sending the faulty drive into WD, to get replaced, but what is Western Digital's policy of the warranty peroid. I don't really care about getting the drive replaced, (Something I know the warranty definitively covers), but I want to know does Western Digital, cover the process of professional data recovery in the warranty too? For those wondering what the issue is, the HDD is still detected at bootup, but it comes up with smart failure, and it slows the computer down to a crawl, and when Windows does eventually boot, the drive doesn't show up in my computer, and I haven't tested anything much further. Can someone help? Thanks

As others have noted, no manufacturer covers data in the warranty, they'd all go bankrupt overnight if they did (or else drives would cost 20 times as much)

If the lady really needs the data, she should be able to get it recovered by somewhere like http://www.datalab.co.nz/services/hard-drive-recovery

It will generally cost somewhere around $500-1000

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