"Lose data? We can help! CALL NOW!", reads dtidata's website. So, if your hard disk has recently crashed and was full of valuable data, months of work or personal documents, and you're willing to pay somewhere north of a thousand dollars to get it back, this might be one of the places you would turn to.
One word of advice: don't.
That Dtidata's website is all glossy and professional-looking will only add insult to injury after they fail to help you. How could they fail? Supposedly, they've recovered data for Campbell's soup, the U.S. Government and Nasa. Funny how those are all entities that are so huge you could never lead an investigation to find out if that's true or not. But frankly, if Nasa did ever trust these morons, I'm not surprised the last shuttle went up in flames.
My fury has nothing to do with money. Dtidata's policy is that if they can't retrieve your data, they don't charge you - had they tried, I wouldn't be on this website, but in court. No, my fury has to do with customer-#@%6-service.
"Most drives recovered 4-6 business days", also reads the website. After losing a 200gb Western Digital drive, the second one in less that two weeks (see my consumer complaints on Western Digital, a company that "understands the value of the data stored on [their] drives", not) I send my drive to Dtidata - those nasa guys, by Fedex overnight express.
Next day, they call me and tell me they have the drive and they'll be looking at it in the afternoon. I wait for the call. It doesn't come. I wait the next day, still no call. I call in, and I get some inarticulate teenager who seems overwhelmed at the idea of answering a phone and who tells me to "just relax, okay?". I have two hundred gigabytes of my work in your hands and I'm supposed to relax? Don't think so, pizzaface. Thus my first contact with them is of being condescended to a stuttering adolescent.
Whatever. If they can get my data back I'm happy. I wait. Two days later, still no word. I call back. Still the same confusion at the other end of the line at having to answer phones. It's never the same guy. He never knows where anyone is. I finally get the cell phone of one of the techs and call him up. I have to squint to understand his continuous stream of mumbling mush, but when I'm finally able to understand him, what I hear are the first good news - he tells me it's "looking good", and that it "shouldn't be a big deal". I'm relieved.
Never mind it's taking them 4 of the 6 advertised days just to look at the drive. I hope that if it's "looking good", maybe they'll get it in the next two or three days, and I'll be back in business. Anyhow he sounds confident - it sounds like it's just a matter of time. But time, in my present situation, is of the essence.
I wait.
I wait.
I wait.
The seventh day is now upon me. This is the day when God took a break, I'm hoping it'll be the day I can get back to work. I call. The tech tells me there's a complication and he's going to have to open the drive. Doesn't that void the warranty, I ask? This is a four-hundred dollar hard drive.
He says sure, but we can write a letter to Western Digital detailing what happened. Naively, I assume he knows what he's talking about. But you can already see the black cloud on the horizon.
I will summarize the next phase for it was somewhat repetitive - it consists of me routinely calling in to check progress and routinely running up against the worst telephone service I have ever seen. Being bounced back from person to person, being put on hold for endless oceans of time, and being taken with a grain of salt because, well, maybe it's because I'm not mister Campbell. This phase, my friends, lasted two fu*ing weeks.By now we are three weeks into the "4-6 business days" deal. I call, and the news finally falls.
"It's wasted. We're sending it back to you".
Okay. Deep breath. I know data recovery is an inexact science. I don't feel so good that their initial diagnostic was positive and that it took them three weeks to finally tell me I'm screwed. I don't feel so good about their evasiveness and dismissiveness over the phone, but what-ever. I will put it behind me. Just send me the letter the tech promised to write to Western Digital so I can at least get my drive replaced.
The answer: "What letter?" I explain myself. But the guy, who sounds like he's absorbed in a game of Galaga while he's talking to me, shrugs it off: "dude, your warranty's dead. We can't do anything about that." I very, very slowly try to breathe, but my last effort at remaining calm is shattered when he says: "there are only three companies that are certified not to void warranties, we aren't one of them."
Note that these are the first confident words I've heard from that office. Almost rehearsed. If they know this, why did they wave around the idea of some letter? I ask to talk to the tech who brought this up. I'm told he's not around. I ask the guy for his supervisor. He doesn't seem to have one. I ask him if he's self-employed but he can't answer that either. I tell him, "I want to talk to the person who OWNS dtidata. Who OWNS this fu*ing company? Who HIRED you? What is that person's * DAMN NAME?"
Well, my friends, he was not able to answer any of those questions. I have left messages to the tech asking for the letter, and so far have been outright ignored. At this point it's out of principle, I don't even care anymore - but I don't like the smell of Dtidata's urine all over my face.
Note this: in all this pointless odyssey I never managed to get through to a manager or a company owner. I guess the place runs itself — From the tech I gathered everyone was in charge. From my instinct I gathered this: noone is in charge at dtidata.com. And if you commit the folly of sending you data to them, only you can be held responsible for your actions.
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