Of service, expectations and backing up

If you have been reading this blog for any amount of time or come to PMUG you know that we drum backing up into your heads. Some think people like Charles and myself are backup crazy, but let me walk you through a little story that happened recently.

I bought a new MacBook Pro last month just before MacCamp. After vetting the migration of my data to the machine, I set up two Time Machines, one locally attached, one remote. The remote Time Machine is constantly backing up, while the locally attached drive is usually offsite (in case of fire, etc)

A few weeks ago the brand new MacBook Pro started exhibiting a noisy left fan, which got louder as I played WoW, and quieter when I did not. Because a dying fan means more heat in the computer, which leads to more failures, I wanted to get this repaired as soon as possible.

This past Sunday I headed down to the Washington Square Apple Store, because Pioneer Place, while closer, had no available appointments, and more importantly, Washington Square has been impeccable in their timeliness and quality of support.

I get to the store on time and tell the genius what is happening. He takes the machine to the back, then returns some 10 minutes later and confirms my diagnosis. He says that since Apple wants to see these failing machines, he’d like to just swap my drive into a new machine. Perfect! I noted to my friend Michael, who was with me, that this is one huge advantage of the new MacBook Pro design.

About 10 minutes later, the genius (who might have also been the manager on duty) returns with my new machine, nicely wrapped up and tells me I could check it out. I boot the machine and here is where the next 14 hours of my life takes a turn I was not expecting.

The first thing I see is the language selection screen, indicating a drive with a new OS install is in the machine. I inform the genius and he apologizes then takes the machine back again.

He returns notifying me that the drives were accidentally put back into their respective machines and that the swap would happen now.

About 30 minutes later (I knew this was bad by this point) he informs me that they swapped the drives, but are now just getting a flashing ? with my drive. Ooops.

Ok, I did update both Time Machines earlier in the day, so I was pretty well off, though I had not backed up my VMWARE virtual machines since I had the new machine. Maybe I could recover the data.

Another 30 minutes passes and they inform me that they tried the drive in several machines to no avail. They also tried the drive in a sled, and that worked once, but not a second time. Sigh.

After 1 hour, 45 minutes, they ask me what I would like to have done, and I said that I’d like my original drive put into the new computer, because maybe I can target disk mode the drive and disk warrior my virtual machines off the drive. They agree and return later with my machine.

I went home (because well come on, it had been 2 hours) and realize that they never put my original drive in the machine. Now I am mad 🙂

Once I got the new drive booted, I pulled down a System Profile report I had sent Apple just the week earlier, and sure enough, the hard drive serial numbers didn’t match. Smoking gun.

Ok, the drive might have been accidentally fried. That is fine, mistakes happen, and I had enough of two backups that I felt secure. But I didn’t need to be told one thing, and have another thing done. For the second time in one evening no less.

They did give me a 10% off my next purchase card, which was a nice gesture, but I’d have to spend more money to even make use of it, so I felt that was a wash.

I reformat the drive so I can migrate from my locally connected Time Machine (don’t try this with a remote time machine, it takes many, many hours just to mount the sparse bundle alone), and let the restore take place.

Once the machine was up and running, I decided to write a letter to sjobs@apple.com. I’ve had luck with this before, but the letter was not to bitch and complain, it was really to say hey, something is wrong with the process.

My friend in L.A. had just gone through a 3 week Mac Pro repair where, in the end he got an entirely new machine, but only after being told it would be fixed in a week, then told they “could not find the parts” etc.

I tell all of my friends about Apple; Studies show Apple support is above and beyond the rest; Apple runs ads that, while mocking Vista for OS X, also trump the Mac hardware because frankly, you can’t run OS X on anything else without hacking.

I’m a fairly technical guy; What if the average customer ran into this situation? Would their data be backed up? Should they have to deal with what has now taken 7 hours for a 10 minute drive swap? No.

I feel that in relationships, you need to communicate about the positive and negative aspects of the relationship. This only makes both parties stronger. So off to sjobs@apple.com I go.

While writing this letter, the first I’d used what I’ll now call the “new new” machine (seeing as the original machine was only some 5 weeks old and had a dead fan already), I noticed the space bar was not always working. You-have-to-be-kidding me.

Sure enough, it would sometimes miss key presses. Great. So I continue to write my letter, leaving the run together words in the letter, and then point out later the reason for these run together words.

Other than my time, the only thing I was out of pocket on was backup. Both time machines were too full to back up this “new new” machine, so in order to start backing up, I’d have to erase one of my backups, and I didn’t feel comfortable with this.

On top of this, it turns out that Time Machine does not backup unixy bits, like MySQL databases, configuration files, etc. So I really wanted to make sure I had what I needed elsewhere first.

I sent off my letter and went to bed. The next morning, I headed to the Apple Store to deal with the “new new” issue. On the way, I phoned AppleCare and talked with the agent for about 45 minutes (the time it takes to drive to the store) and explained that I was really only upset at being told one thing and having another thing done, that the service has always been exemplary at the store, and I just wanted to help improve things for future apple customers by giving feedback.

He noted that my issue would be escalated to regional managers and the store manager.

I arrived at the store and went through the story again with Kevin, the manager on duty. He was very courteous and spent a fair amount of time and called the employees to figure out what happened the night before. Darren, the lead tech, tried hard to figure out why my drive was not working anymore, but was at a loss as to what happened.

They offered to swap my keyboard, or try the dreaded-tightrope-thrill-a-minute drive swap into a “new new new” machine. I opted for the latter.

They returned my new new new machine already booted and at the login screen. At least they verified that much was working before handing it to me 🙂

I ran a battery of tests and the machine seemed ok. I did notice the screen flicker off and on once, but it has only done it the one time and I’ll keep an eye on it. If there is an issue, I’d rather it fixed later, when a newer back of machines arrives, just in case this first batch has a large percentage of issues.

Then Kevin went above and beyond the call of duty and gave me a 1 terrabyte time capsule! He was very concerned about my data and wanted to make sure everything was taken care of. While I surely don’t expect them to make this policy, it was certainly appreciated and yet another example of Apple going above and beyond the standard line of taking care of customers.

Even more impressive was that they had already started making adjustments to their process by having less people involved, which only introduced more confusion.

This morning I received a call from the manager on duty Sunday evening. He apologized, wanted to make sure everything was taken care of and even mentioned that he had been forwarded my email to sjobs@apple.com.

You know, it pays off to treat people with respect, to be calm headed and to try and keep the big picture in mind. I lost a total of about 14 hours and a half-days work in this fiasco. I could have been livid, yelling, pissed off, <insert adjective here> like some I’ve seen and known, but I chose to just try and make sure the process is better for everyone tomorrow.

Maybe that happened.

As for Apple, they need to stop putting poor quality components in their machines. My lost time, my frustration, the stress of several apple store employees and thousands of dollars on Apple’s bottom line could have been avoided by having a better fan component that would have lasted more than five weeks.

This is not a new trend; The only reason I know Washington Square has been exemplary in repairs is because each of my three MacBook Pros (Rev A, Santa Rosa, and now GlassyPad) have had at least one, if not more repairs done to them, including the infamous flames of death from this past summer 🙂

Someone at Apple needs to take a look at this. It is not good enough to be better than Dell. Apple needs to hold itself up to its own standards.

In the meantime, as I told the manager today, I hope to see them again, but as a customer, not for yet another repair.

As for me, as soon as I can free up a drive, I’ll be adding a Super Duper! clone into my backup cycle. This will make restoring from a drive wipe accident much much faster than restoring from Time Machine.

I also upgraded to Toast 9 and got back into large DVD archives of my most important data. Toast 9 is fantastic.

The more our lives become digitized, the more we become personal IT departments. We reap what we sow, I suppose.

Make sure you have a strong backup and archival solution! You never know when a fan will take down your data empire. 🙂