For the price of a freakin' usb hdd...
How did Asus respond when you asked them "WHY THE FUCK DID YOU WIPE THE HARD DRIVE YOU FUCKWITS?!"?
Also, you need to charge your daughter for both the recovery time and the time and media needed to take another backup that you keep somewhere safe so she can't bloody "make space" from it! O_o
I'm cooling down first. They sent a 'how did we do?' questionnaire after the last repair. I'll wait a couple of days for that and then let them know.
I'm reasonably sure they didn't have to replace the motherboard again. I tried to source it myself and found that the cheapest I could get the exact model was just over £400 so I doubt it's cheap for them. She was having regular problems with network connectivity from soon after buying it, which is why it went back this time - and as expected they finally got round to replacing the network card. It's a custom built board by Asus based on an Intel 8260 chipset - and with a headphone socket. Hmm. Which sort of makes me think that they went 'Oh, lets just replace the lot'. Personally, I think that running the recovery programme was a mistake: a bit of carelessness.
Asus subcontract their UK repair work to an international conglomerate called Letmerepair. I expect that as long as stuff comes in and stuff moves out, they don't give a toss about the owners. They aren't the customer after all.
I could charge my daughter, but since she's getting all her money from me at the moment it seems a bit circular. And yes, I will put a backup on my server and it will stay up to date.
Well, a footnote. Recuva didn't do it and neither did Wondershare or any of the other free to try ones I had a go with, until I was 2 minutes from giving up. I resisted EaseUS because they splash their products over the net like snake-oil vendors, but I take it all back. It worked perfectly.
EaseUS data recovery was twice as fast as ALL the others scanning the SSD (500GB) in around 4 hours. It found 5 lost partitions as opposed to 2 that all the others found. It presented the results in a nice tree structured file manager with all the original folder names. It previewed all the files perfectly, regardless of type. Best of all, it actually recovered all the data I wanted. It's pay-for (for recovery of over 2GB) and I didn't object to shelling-out.
I suspect that the others I tried are all sharing either whole blocks of code or at least common techniques because all of them failed to discover all of the residual drives and none of them produced usable output. In particular, I think Wondershare may be a cloned Recuva with a shitty Java and XML GUI bolted on top to disguise the fact.
Yay! That's worth knowing. How much was it? Any subsidy from Jim? Not that I'd be keen on a Jim industries product rummaging about in the underwear drawer of Little Blue.
It was more than I wanted to pay at just over £70. That said, if you have a couple of GB to recover from a folder or a USB stick or whatever, then it's free. They're very keen on special offers so it will probably be available for £9.95 in a week or so.
It got back all my daughters photos from when she was a teenager right through University, including her year at Rennes University. There are photos she took with my parents who are both dead now and loads of events. I'd have been a bit of a bastard not to pay.
Incidentally, this is the second bit of software I've bought online in the last couple of weeks where the GB Pound price is higher than the US Dollar price. Thanks Brexit!
Don't know how it compares but I always use GetDataBack for recovering stuff. Not free though.
Have you done the questionnaire yet? :J
I appreciate this is locking the proverbial horse after a door's bolted, but for future reference we've had pretty good results with Stellar Data Recovery's products. They've expanded their wares a bit since we bought their exchange recovery stuff, so can't comment on the new products, but if they work as well as it did when we needed to restore a mailbox from a deprecated raid array from an Exchange 2000 box, then it gets a thumbs up.
Yes. I made it clear that they had caused distress and problems.