Don't alway trust the experts

Hi Everyone

I received a very distressed phone call from a friends sister last week, she had a very reputable home help computer company (that she regularly used) upgrade her PC and operating system. This lady is not a computer person at all, and is totally at the mercy of what she is told by the expert. One thing that she did continue to tell him but, was that her her 10 years of accounting records were of the utmost importance and very valuable. He asked haven't you got any backups? to which her response was "I don't know! that's what I pay you for"

This lady was supplied a new PC with the latest operating system, and the latest version of her accounting software installed, the expert in the mean time had told her that she could dispose of her old PC as long as she kept the hard drive. (This lady is a clean, tidy freak, and the thought of an unnecessary "old computer" occupying space was an annoyance). 

It is at this point in time that things went south, I am not privy to the method that the expert used to try and bring her accounting files into the new machine, but he was unable to do so with success. Accessing the old hard drive did not help at all, although the files could be seen they were not able to be retrieved. The expert simply told her they were "corrupt" and that was it, he couldn't help her.

The biggest mistake in this whole process was that the old working computer was discarded before the new system was up and running and all the data was accessible. If it was kept, this lady would still have a working version of all her data. The next mistake I believe was that the expert didn't do enough research into the correct procedure for updating the data to the latest version of the accounting software.

I advised her to stop them from playing with her data any further and cut her losses with them, as the more they played with the data the more damaged it may become. 

I tried to access her old hard drive but I just kept getting "No Operating System Found". So, Long story short, after 2 whole days work and lots of patience I was able to retrieve her data and update it for her. The last option available was to send the files into the Accounting Software Vendor's data retrieval team, this would have run out to a small fortune in cost.

My other issue with this expert, is that they failed to take ownership for a problem that I feel was clearly their fault. The customer should have been given more help than hands thrown in the air and told its corrupt. When they returned her hard drive, they left it at her front door and left without speaking to her!

The big lesson here apart from the old "Backup Backup", is that if your data is really important to you, always maintain a working version of it somewhere. If I help anyone upgrade to a new PC, I always leave the old system intact for at least 1 month, or at least maintain a working (virtual) version of that system.