News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

April 11, 2007

stores

I doubt Apple would want my data. It’s fairly boring.

Posted Apr. 11, ’07, 11:30 AM PT by Kate Marshall
Category | Apple » Stores

burnt hard drive.jpgSo as you may have guessed, we’re big on the Backing Up of the Data here at MacUser. But what do you do if you want to back up your data but someone’s standing in your way? Someone like…Apple, Inc. themselves?

You see, “Chris,” recently contacted The Consumerist website because Apple wanted to keep his hard drive in case they couldn’t repair it or restore the data on it—and refused to give the drive back to Chris so he could erase any personal data on the drive, citing standard industry practice. Even when he offered to buy the drive back, they said “no.” He could have his new hard drive or the old, possibly-broken one, but not both. Chris decided to cancel the existing repair, pick up his old drive from the Apple Store, erase the data himself, and bring it back to the store so a new drive could be swapped into his laptop.

There is a somewhat happy ending to this story: when Chris hooked up the old drive, he recovered its contents before returning it with a new peace of mind (relatively speaking). One wonders why it’s standard industry practice to keep hard drives around when a customer offers to buy it back for her own piece of mind but at least a catastrophic loss of data was averted.

[Via Digg]


3 Comments

Neven said:

You're supposed to wipe and backup BEFORE you turn in your HDD for replacement. Otherwise, Apple is selling you an old HDD, something they're not in the business of. Is anyone really surprised that Apple wouldn't "sell" him his old hard drive when they were replacing it with a new one? How would they price it? How would they ring it up?

April 11, 2007 12:18 PM
Jason said:

Actually if you bring your laptop to an AppleStore for repair you can request your old HD back. They will take an imprint of your Credit Card and if you don't return the old drive they will charge you the price for the new part. At least this is how it worked when I was a Mac Genius.

April 12, 2007 8:19 AM
arif said:

@Neven:
Sometimes it's not easy to wipe and backup your hdd before replacement. I love apple as much as the next guy but sometimes the blatant fanboyism of apple users confuses me.

May 4, 2007 12:58 PM

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