Gone for good is seven years worth of correspondence between three generations of the buyer's family, as well as 2,000 e-mail addresses and all the administrative files for a fledgling news site. The stuff was on a drive that the store - not one of the big chains - tossed out instead of copying over to a new PC it sold a colleague of mine. (Yes, we beat him mercilessly for not backing it up.)
Your assignment here is to help determine proper compensation for this loss.
I'm not naming the store - Its motto: "Service you can count on, people you can trust!" - because my colleague and his wife are still in negotiations with its management over what constitutes fair restitution and I'd rather not complicate that process by generating ill will toward the merchant. And besides, this is an academic exercise.
Here's the lowdown from an e-mail sent to me by my co-worker:
I'd like some feedback about an issue I'm having with (a local computer store.):
I bought a new PC there this month. I left specific directions to transfer all data from the two hard drives of my old PC to the new. My requests were not followed. They transferred data from one drive (an older one) but did not transfer data from the new drive. In fact, they threw it out, and it cannot be recovered.
Yes, an argument for always backing up data somewhere else, but ...
We paid $1,000 for the new PC. The store owner is offering us a $250 store credit and knocking $100 off the price of Office 2007.
My wife thinks we should get $500 cash back and reject the store credit.
What do you think?
Thanks for your help.
His appreciation was premature because I'm lousy at this kind of thing. Yes, I may be a professional arguer by day, but off hours I generally avoid confrontation like a retail store avoids responsibility.
That's why we need your help.
What should my friend and his wife be demanding of the "people you can trust?"
What should the store be willing to do to make good?
What's fair here?
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I can't get past the lack of
I can't get past the lack of a backup. If he had done one before having them do the transfer, how much would they owe him? It's kind of like film developers (remember film?) being responsible for damaged film but not lost pictures.
That's all the time I have right now. Gotta go back up seven years of email.
yup
Gotta say they should get nothing, they are lucky to be offered store credit!
If the data was that valuable they could have easily bought a removeable HDD or a DVD writer and backed it all up, i do understand their plight but they are partially to blame for the data loss too
store screwed up
Its hard to imagine any circumstance in which the store should get off easy. Specifically paying for a data copy should nullify a data loss clause unless you are talking about best efforts data recovery from a failing drive. They do sell USB to hard drive interfaces that have a hardware write protect. The store should've been using one to guarantee preservation of the original. Liability for only the service not performed is insufficient restituition, but a million dollars is excessive. The data ought to be worth a couple grand if for no other reason than minimal litigation would cost that and the store screwed up.
We need to add that the old
We need to add that the old pc is still the property of the owner, right? So wouldn't discarding the hard drive be considered destruction of personal property. The fact that the hard drive contains valuable information to the owner makes the drive worth more than the actual replacement cost of a disk drive. Determine the value of the drive plus the information and then you have a fair settlement.
I agree with the above. In
I agree with the above. In other cases, I'd feel that what the guy has been offered is probably enough, since he should have made a backup. BUT because he paid specifically for back-up services, the store is responsible. He turned responsibility of his data over to the store, who failed him badly.
Picture taking some very important documents to FedEx to have a copy made - and they shred them instead. Was it your fault you didn't make a copy before you went to make a copy? No. It's their fault for messing up data they explicitly took responsibility for by agreeing to copy it.
Stores Fault
This is the Stores Fault if they had proper system this would not of happend, in fact they should of said to you would you like the hard drives in your new PC, you can have more then 2 Hard drives!!
and the fact they "Threw" it away is probley bull, whats probley happend is they Messed up the hard drive (static, Droped it) chose your choice of destruction lots of ways!
SUE THERE ARSE!!! espicaly if you had photos and other unreplaceble files
but a leason learnt for your selvs DVD's and DVD writers are cheap!
Sue them....really?
Ahem....try to PROVE what the value of the data that was on the hard drive WITHOUT having any physical copy of it. You can claim you just lost your theory that proves that the "big bang" is a hoax, but try to prove it. Any GOOD lawyer would tell you to take the $$ and run.
The most you'd get out of me is the cost back for the service(s) that was not rendered - which is all that he is out.
The data - that is his fault, especially if it is valuable data. Whether it is replaceable or not is of no consequence to the case.
Car Wash
If you took your car to a fancy detail place to have it completely cleaned and the guy doing the interior cleaned out your glove box and through it all alway. What if you have important information in there? Should the owner be compensated?
Yes this moron should have a backup but the company did not do their job even close and the customer is suppose to take it and like it.
// For the life of me I don't know why people buy computers from places like this. I never hear people having good experiences with this big box stores.
Public Property
Have you ever noticed that the car wash places all have a sign out front that read "Not responsible for lost items?" The same theory holds here. If your stupid enough to leave your valuables open and available to the public (and anyone with a brain has to realize that a business's employees are no more trustworthy than the public) then you will most likely loose them.
"If your stupid..." Heh.
"If your stupid..."
Heh.