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It's a familiar lament: David Shepherd was pootling blamelessly through cyberspace when his computer crashed and could not be reawakened. He hurried it off for surgery at PC World where he was told that a memory install and system restore would breathe new life into it. Shepherd consented, then, when he collected the machine, discovered that his hard drive had been wiped clean. "It was as though the computer was brand new," he says. "I'd lost all the software plus photographs, music, work for the MSc programme I'm studying and other irreplaceable documents."
A PC World staff member apologised and offered to perform a hard drive recovery but this only salvaged a fraction of the missing data. In the three months since, Shepherd has tried tirelessly to extract more redress from PC World but was told that he was to blame for not backing up his files and that the company could accept no responsibility. Now obviously Shepherd and all the rest of us should regularly back up crucial documents, especially if a computer is about to undergo repairs. Equally, however, you may think he should have been warned that the operation would restore the machine to factory settings and risk the loss of all data before he agreed to the repairs. PC World, nudged by the Guardian, now accepts that it "probably" did not. Having rebuffed him for three months it also now admits it did not address his concerns promptly and it has agreed to send £120 in goodwill.
Mere money will not, obviously, make up for the loss of five years' worth of family photos, but since I've received many similar complaints over the years, let this be a lesson to us all: whether the company in question warns you or not, there is always a risk that repairs will cleanse a computer's hard drive so invest in a clutch of memory sticks and get copying.
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