Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Applecare drive data policies? 10
yakumo.unr writes: Applecare (UK) took my friend's Powerbook in for servicing as his hard drive was being faulty, and incredibly slow, but was still accessible.
They swapped the drive out over three days, and once he travelled for an hour to pick it up, on asking about his old drive as it had his degree work on it he was told
'you can have your faulty hard drive back OR the fixed one, we can't let you have both'
It was also claimed they now couldn't get the data back off the old one.
At no point previously had they warned him they would not return his disk, or his data, though when he had asked about his old drive on the phone before travelling he was told the disk would not be destroyed until after the customer had picked up their machine, implying he had an option to NOT have it destroyed.
Certainly if policy is to destroy it why was he not allowed to do so himself!?
I've certainly heard of many cases of less ethical employees saying this is far too often just to make the customer drop it and go, less work than finding the drive in question let alone going through the data recovery options available to the customer unless the customer made a real fuss.
I basically feel his data was held to ransom over a working machine, and I have been unable to find out about their drive destruction policies so also fear over the security of his lost data.
How do people feel about this? (other than the obvious 'he should have backed up everything!!', a lot of his data is on Dropbox, but he found not everything was).
What is his legal position over attempting to get his old drive back to recover or destroy himself?
They swapped the drive out over three days, and once he travelled for an hour to pick it up, on asking about his old drive as it had his degree work on it he was told
'you can have your faulty hard drive back OR the fixed one, we can't let you have both'
It was also claimed they now couldn't get the data back off the old one.
At no point previously had they warned him they would not return his disk, or his data, though when he had asked about his old drive on the phone before travelling he was told the disk would not be destroyed until after the customer had picked up their machine, implying he had an option to NOT have it destroyed.
Certainly if policy is to destroy it why was he not allowed to do so himself!?
I've certainly heard of many cases of less ethical employees saying this is far too often just to make the customer drop it and go, less work than finding the drive in question let alone going through the data recovery options available to the customer unless the customer made a real fuss.
I basically feel his data was held to ransom over a working machine, and I have been unable to find out about their drive destruction policies so also fear over the security of his lost data.
How do people feel about this? (other than the obvious 'he should have backed up everything!!', a lot of his data is on Dropbox, but he found not everything was).
What is his legal position over attempting to get his old drive back to recover or destroy himself?
