Apple Comes Through … I hope!
Is there a more worrisome moment than when your computer stops working? Not in my book, there isn’t. And it happened to me yesterday morning. Turned on my Mac and it was very slow opening, then wouldn’t do anything. Ran perfectly the night before, but woke up broken. Go figure.
I bought an Apple Care agreement when I bought the computer so I started that process, calling somebody who was going to walk me through a few quick steps and have my Mac up and running in a matter of minutes. I finally connected with an advisor–he sounded about 12 years old and probably was–who had me try several things. None of them worked.
You begin to worry when the advisor puts you on hold for three or four minutes, then come back and says you are being referred to a SENIOR advisor, In my case, that was someone named Shawna.
After two more attempts to get my balky Mac to restart, both unsuccessful, I once again found myself on hold. To pass the time, I began to run through all the information stored deep within my Mac … files that I would really hate to lose. For one thing, there are almost all of the photos I’ve taken on my travels over the past decade. Lots of family stuff, including medical records. There’s a list of all our charitable contributions and receipts for all the expenses I rang up traveling to and from two NARP meetings a year. (NARP is a non-profit organization so, as a member of the board of directors, the expenses I incur traveling to and from the meetings are deductible.)
At any rate, Shawna finally said I needed to take my computer to a local Apple store here on Maui, which I did yesterday afternoon.
It took the techie about ten minutes to run a couple of tests and determine that my hard drive had failed. Not to worry, he said, they will order a new hard drive and, because I bought the Apple Care plan, both it and the installation will be no charge. What’s not to like about that?
In the meantime, I’m using my MacBook Air laptop, which will be accompanying me when I leave for Chicago on Monday and which I will use to report here on my NARP board meetings, as well as my rail journey back to Los Angeles. As is my preference, I’ll be aboard the California Zephyr from Chicago to Davis, California, connecting the next morning for the ride down to L.A. on the Coast Starlight. Full reports to come, the good Lord willin’ and if the creek don’t rise.
Oh … and if the wi-fi is working in the Coast Starlight’s parlor car.
Been there, done that with hard drive crashes. Unless you have backed up the data from your drive Jim, the data on your old drive may be lost forever. You do backup your data regularly, right? :-) I learned that lesson the hard way when I lost a hard drive and most of the data was lost. The cost to retrieve what was available was over $1000. Will Apple attempt to capture the data from your old drive as part of Apple Care? One hopes. Good luck!
Thanks for the good wishes. I do have Carbonite, so that’s a fallback if the techie can’t retrieve all the files. There’s no doubt, however, that I should manually back up on a regular basis … to a Zip dive, I guess. Sheesh!