I am not the most tech-savvy guy in the world, not by a long shot. But I didn’t just fall off the Amiga (obscure reference to the ancient and mainly extinct 3rd option to mac and pc from the infant days of the home computer age) truck either. But this is really more about customer service than being tech-savvy anyway.

I’d been using the 1 terra-byte external hard drive from La Cie, called the Big Disk, to store my digital images. Image management can be more of a job than the actual taking of actual pictures. I have a simple methodology: take pictures. Download to computer. Back up to the Big Disk. Problem is, I’d go to fetch some of my pictures from the Big Disk only to find a Big Disconnect. After wasting hours trouble-shooting my network with my teach-savvy brother, I get La Cie on the phone: “Yeah we have a problem with the power supply, we can send you a new power cord and that should fix it.” I happen to live about 10 minutes from La Cie’s HQ, so I drove down and got one. Problem solved. For about 4 months. Problem then arises again. I go back to La Cie, again, and this time get two new power cords. Problem solved, until recently. When the Big Disk did the Big Belly Up and wouldn’t power up at all.

Back to La Cie I trouble-shoot. And they basically say: “Yeah sorry, but you’re out of warranty so we can’t help you. You might be able to salvage the hard drives through a 3rd party but we Disavow any knowledge of that idea and will basically now do the Big Disappearing Act.”

Which they did. Even though the problem had started, and was documented in La Cie’s service records, well within the warranty window. Luckily, the actual hard drives within La Cie’s enclosure were built by a reliable company, Western Digital. $200 later I was able to get my pictures retrieved and transferred to a reliable device. I can use the original two Western Digital 500 gb hard drives in the La Cie Big Disk as back up, after I re-format them and put them in a new enclosure.  But this was a Big Hassle. Cost Big time and money. My experience with La Cie has left me wishing I’d been dealing with Amiga.