Daughter's laptop went in for another repair with Asus recently and came back today. It was in a few weeks back for a new MB and this time it had ANOTHER one plus a new network card. Not bad for a 6 month old Zenbook.

It was the daughter who sent it this time. 'DON'T FORGET TO TAKE A BACKUP' I urged her over and over. The reply was 'Yes, dad I will. But they won't wipe it if you let them have the password.' I wasn't too worried as I'd already given her a full backup that I did when it went off last time, so all she could lose would be a couple of tunes or photos. 

I did make sure that Asus had the password though.

So a week ago she says 'OOPS'. She's formatted the last backup I gave her 'to make space'. I am now a bit concerned, but as she points out, Asus have her password and NO REASON to wipe the hard drive.

Except that now it's back and the work sheet details 1) new motherboard, 2) new network card - Oh - and 3) restore operating system (tick). What godawful stupidity made them do that? Now I'm sitting waiting for a recover program to unformat a backup drive. It's found a lot of files but I don't hold out much hope of getting everything off an SSD. Thousands of photos going back 10 years, thousands of music files, all her uni work (Thank God she's actually finished)

Maybe it wouldn't boot up after repairs, and rather than spend hours/days faffing around the sop is to do a restore?

I don't hold much hope for your recovery unfortunately :( I'd strongly suggest some sort of cloud backup, at least for photos etc.

I've had some of the pain from no backups to now backup fairly well. But I can't imagine the pain of a lost backup when you've actually put in the effort :C

Well, the scan through is 85% complete now. It reports 281GB of files but I won't have any idea of their state until I get a chance to preview a few. I imagine many of them will be irrecoverable because they will be files that were overwritten (by the last backup) but then, I don't really want those. I also know that the prospect of recovery from an SSD is much much worse than from an HDD. Fingers crossed I suppose.

It also occurs to me that I'm using a free (scan and preview version). I wonder if I can buy the license and put it in at the same time as saving the scan. I don't really want to sit through another 4 hours of this.

There's definitely free tools available to do this. Sure I've used photorec in the past with good success.

I think there's some recovery cd/USB type things around that can do a decent job. Though you're 4 hours in so I imagine you don't fancy turning back unless you run it overnight.

Recuva is a pretty good tool for recovering files. It'll list pretty much everything and will confirm what it can recover, what it can't, what it got overwritten with, etc. And it's free as well. Used it a number of times, all with decent results.

Yep, I'm using that right now and it looks as though I've got all the photos and documents. For some bizarre reason neither Recuva nor the pay-for Wondershare thing could find all the music. That may not be a problem as my daughter has just announced that she's recently updated her ipod with her full itunes library. So we can rebuild the PC version from that.

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.

 

> but since she's getting all her money from me at the moment it seems a bit circular.

If it were me, I'd still do an itemised bill - making the point so she understands and values both backups and your cleaning up after her.