Now, this is what customer service looks like
It’s been a rough week in tech.
I accidentally deleted almost 2Tb of data from my Drobo external hard drive on Tuesday, just before I installed Snow Leopard. I wasn’t worried, however, since I’d backed up everything to BackBlaze. Or so I thought.
I’m still working through the issues with Backblaze, and am hoping for a positive outcome. But I’m not hopeful, and yesterday sent an email to Apple asking for help in restoring my lost purchases from the iTunes store. I had low expectations, since I’d read previously that Apple expects you to back up your data, and doesn’t allow for re-downloads because of the piracy risk.
My request sent through support.apple.com read as follows:
I recently had a catastrophic hard disk failure. I’ve lost about 80% of my iTunes Library. I can re-rip my own CDs, but I have hundreds of movies, TV shows and songs that I have bought off the iTunes store that I have lost.Yes, I did have a backup through Backblaze.com, but they had an error on their side and I’m only able to get back a small portion of my data (only artists A-C, basically). Can you please help me with the remaining files? Please?Jeff
Just a few hours after the note to Apple, I received the following response:
I was stunned. There was no request for a list of the missing files, no back and forth on how it happened, no request for proof of my botched backup, etc., etc. Just a simple message saying they’d made an exception and had queued up my missing files for re-download. I was ecstatic.
Upon starting up iTunes, I was greeted with the following status at the bottom of the downloads window.
And now, as I write this, the downloads wheel in iTunes is spinning away and the item count slowly ticking down. As someone who thought he was looking at having to repurchase thousands of dollars worth of content again, it’s a beautiful sight.
What’s more, any concerns I had about buying through the iTunes Store has completely evaporated. And how could it not? What could you call this other than exceptional customer service?
What’s more, the advantage to buying content through electronic means just revealed one of its great advantages over its analog equivalent. Can you imagine the reaction I would get were I to walk into Target or Tower Records or any of the other retailers I’ve bought my CDs at and said, “excuse me, I lost my music and movies…could you please give me new ones?” They’d laugh me out of the store, and rightly so.
I still have the daunting task ahead of me of re-ripping my CDs, of course. Assuming, mind you, that BackBlaze is unable to work some magic and find the data their backup client reported was on their servers. And should they fail, I’m certainly going to look for another online service to be the “backup of my backup.”
But I really must hand it to Apple here. They responded quickly to a simple request, and exceeded my own expectations in doing so. Such a rare treat these days.
