Situation - customer's drives seems to be failing - they bring it in

[ElementalWindX]

Originally Posted by Bobscomputerservice

Every computer i pickup i backup before i work on it. Just in case. If they want the data i charge 50 or 75 depending on how much time it takes. Data recovery is billed at an hourly rate. Any backup solution onsite is billed regularly.

Kudos to you on that but I bet that seriously lengthens your turn around times. Why do you choose to do that?

[Cornerstone Technologies]

I charge flat rates based on how large the backup is, ranges from $25 to $75. Since I image nearly every machine that comes in to protect against shop error, anything I make in this regard is nice to recoup. Like it has been echoed by others, data recoveries are separate and based on time involved.

Backing up each unit does take a bit of extra time, but in prior shops, other employees or myself would occasionally run into a situation where we either made a mistake or the clients requests change. I do it now as a matter of procedure, because the stress as a result of a mistake is not worth it to me. In the past, I have made huge mistakes when it comes to ensuring that the clients data is available, and there isn't anything worse to deal with.

[Martyn]

Originally Posted by Cornerstone Technologies

I charge flat rates based on how large the backup is, ranges from $25 to $75. Since I image nearly every machine that comes in to protect against shop error, anything I make in this regard is nice to recoup. Like it has been echoed by others, data recoveries are separate and based on time involved.

Backing up each unit does take a bit of extra time, but in prior shops, other employees or myself would occasionally run into a situation where we either made a mistake or the clients requests change. I do it now as a matter of procedure, because the stress as a result of a mistake is not worth it to me. In the past, I have made huge mistakes when it comes to ensuring that the clients data is available, and there isn't anything worse to deal with.

Same here, usually only about 20-30 mins or so with Acronis.

[contrive]

Like most have recommended, i'd suggest you charge a flat rate for such services. The amount of time varies too much to place an hourly rate. With a few years experience, you should be able to set a flat rate to almost all of your services.

What I do is check the SMART data first. If there are ANY yellow or red flags, then it will be handled and billed as a damage recovery. No flags, do surface scan for bad sectors. If bad sectors, handle/bill as damaged recovery. If not, then proceed with regular recovery/backup rate, even if it only involves a simple clean-up to free space.

[Tony_Scarpelli]

If it is a simple backup we charge $49 plus $100 to backup up to about 10 gig.

Then we charge $59 per hour after the first 2 hrs to get the rest of the data. So 250 Gb might be about 5 hrs depending on what we backed it up too. They would need to buy another drive large enough to backup to or we have to charge them twice once to backup and once to restore it to a new drive for them. We might also run antivirus to figure out why the drive is full. 99% full is extraordinarily high utilization. We tend to get clients to add hd space when they get above 75%.

However in a case where I suspected the drive were bad, I'd remove obvious non needed files to open the drive up and then target the first folders to be backed up in case of pending failure.

basically there is no upper limit we would charge $59 per hour however long it takes to get the data that they told us was important. It is not uncommon to charge $300 or $450 for jobs like this.

['putertutor]

I back up almost every machine I work on, for the same reasons others have mentioned - to protect myself in case of a problem that occurs while the machine is in my custody. Generally, this doesn't cost me much in time, and I don't consider the temporary use of storage an issue either.

If I have to use the backup to recover based on a mistake I made, then I would charge for that. If, however, a recovery is needed due to no fault of my own, then I do charge for that.

[Xander]

Charging by the hour on a backup? That's gouge-alicious. Are you paying someone to sit by the system and watch each file get backed up? Or just pushing [BACKUP NOW] and walking away for a few hours?

[HFultzjr]

Originally Posted by tankman1989

With a potentially failing drive the first thing I do is ask about important info on the drive then back it up, or just backup the whole thing unless it is a 3TB multimedia drive. I find out if the data is backed up elsewhere, etc. Let's say that this is a system drive with Mydocs and LOTS of programs from about 5 years of heavy use, so the drive is 99% full, giving errors about "not enough space". This translates to the drive is failing because it is acting slow (customer talk).

Now we know that cleaning up a few files or even a pagefile might do the trick to free up some temp room to make it run, but should an entire backup of that drive be done before working on it?

What if the drive is both faulty and full? Taking steps to clean it up might ruin the slim chance you have to get a copy of the drive and save data.

Let's say you decide to do a full backup of the 250GB drive at about 3 hours of time.

You later find that the drive is not faulty and you just need to uninstall some unused programs, move some files or install a larger hard drive and move everything over.
Now, would you charge for that 3 hour backup of the hard drive? While it is pre-emptive, had the drive been bad and died you would have been saved.

Now if the drive is bad, you can use the backup to restore to a larger drive, say 1TB.

What are your thoughts on this and what would you charge?

Nothing in my opinion beats a good backup of the drive. I almost always do a backup before working on it. I've been burned a few time when I didn't have a backup. I ran into a few situations where usually something I've done had me wanting to go back and start over. Would have been easier and faster than correcting the problems. Not to mention, if the drive fails while you are working on it, you still have the backup. I don't charge a separate charge, but it's built into my prices as a cost of doing business. Usually very little "on hands" time. Mostly sits in a corner chugging away, while I'm doing something else. Saved my butt many times.

[Tony_Scarpelli]

Originally Posted by Xander

Charging by the hour on a backup? That's gouge-alicious. Are you paying someone to sit by the system and watch each file get backed up? Or just pushing [BACKUP NOW] and walking away for a few hours?

If it is press one button and walk away that is one thing. We do those types of backups at night as we are leaving so they work over night without taking out time but this question of failing drive might require a bit more attention than that. Also if it is a matter of scowering a drive to find the appropriate data vs just copying the whole drive. Or If it gets into data recovery then it is by the hour.

We charge by the length of time it sits on the bench. We only have ten spots for a computer on our bench so we can only work on computers on the bench. If your backup is taking 6 hrs on the bench (daytime working hours) then it gets charged 6 hours.

If we do a clone that takes less time and we charge that amount of time. I do not see the three as the same: Simple backup of "my user"; Clone; or a tech scowering a drive to get all information or sensitive data recovery.