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Comment by sabret00the | Hacker News Reader

It's from Lacie, so no thank you. I bought a Lacie drive and proceeded to copy all my stuff onto it. Before I could get comfortable with it (so within the first six months of purchase) and before I backed up my stuff, the drive failed. I contacted Lacie about it and they proceeded to try and sell me a service whereby they'd recover my data for €300. That would've brought my total spend on the drive up to around £400. I begged and pleaded with them, pointed out how unsavoury such a business practice was and all to no avail. The drive has just been sitting down since with the data unrecovered. Personal memories, music, films and professional data too. I've tried to recover the data but that didn't work and I honestly feel ripped off. As a result, I've vowed to never do business with Lacie again and to warn everyone of how unscrupulous they are. Beware of Lacie and their subsidiaries.

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Well, they should have replaced the drive if it failed within 6 months. But expecting them to go to the lengths of recovering your data for free is a bit hopeful.

Hopeful yes, but no one expects a drive failure before even half of the warranty has expired surely?

The whole point of backups is that you should never expect a single hard drive to stay alive, no matter how young it is. Lots of hard drives with defects die early. For your own sanity, it is best to think of any data you have only one physical copy of as data that may not be there tomorrow. Personally I don't get comfortable until my most important data exists in two physical locations, so fire is not a risk.

You had 6 months and you didn't back-up your stuff? Why do you feel there is any blame to be laid at Lacie for this except for the mechanical failure which should have been under warranty? £300 is pretty reasonable for data recovery, it is only meant to be required when the user was dumb enough to not have a single backup. You put all your personal memories, music, films and professional data on one drive and expect sympathy? Learn from this, you are responsible for the safety of your data, have at least 2 backups.

$300 (which is even more reasonable. Otherwise +1.

Just to help you out in future, never ever have precious/important data on one drive, even if its raid. I could not sleep if I knew all my photos and work was on just 1 drive. I get paranoid if my data is in the same physical location.

Hard drives and other storage mediums fail all the time, this is not hyperbole, these devices are not designed for 100% ever. The companies work on the assumption that if they fail they will offer a replacement within warrenty, but expecting to get data recovery for free is not reasonable.

If I was you I would spend a thousand dollars on getting the data off and never making the mistake of keeping important data on 1 storage medium again. Whenever I meet someone who has all their precious data on 1 device like this I tell them that you might as well just throw all that data away now, thats how much you care about it.

Sorry if it hurts dude, just spend the money to have the platters recovered individually and never make the mistake again.

It's very pointedly not their obligation (nor even standard practice for any drive company) to go through the expensive process of recovering your data for you for free. Taking backups is your own problem and responsibility.

They should have offered to replace your drive, but no more. Hardly unscrupulousness.

Wuala has been around for years. Like 5+. Lacie just bought it. Don't conflate.

Edit, 4 years 10 months. Lacie merge in 2010

This is normal for Lacie. I've dealt with them in the past. They are a premium repackaging outfit of some of the lowest grade hardware you can get. They used to prey particularly on Mac users in the early 00's.

However, you should have backed up your stuff in more than one physical place and never assumed that the disk was entirely reliable.

Buy a quality drive enclosure and a quality hard disk, put them together yourself and make sure you have a half decent backup strategy.

Buy WD, Seagate, Samsung drive and have it fail, then try and ask them to recover your data for free.

One must always have at least two copies of any data one cares about and at least one off-site copy.

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