Sometimes when we’re in a hurry, it becomes easy to forget to look after our important belongings.
Recently we had a client who almost lost everything in just a few forgetful moments.
Having forgotten to lock her car doors, our client had her MacBook Pro stolen out of her car in the few minutes that it took her to run inside of a local gas station to pay for her gas.
Her laptop was extremely important to her, as it contained years of pictures, work-related documents, and all of her personal financial book-work. Data that our client unfortunately did not have backed up.
Luckily, the Grand Junction Police were able to recover this vitally important MacBook for our client in about a week’s time. Apparently the thief who took the laptop from her car was so desperate for money, that he pawned the MacBook at a local pawn shop, less than a few miles from where he stole the laptop.
However, prior to pawning the laptop, the thief, in an effort to bypass the client’s user password, formatted the hard drive, and reinstalled an older, out-of-date version of the operating system (OSX 10.6, if you were wondering), which unfortunately erased all of the client’s data. It is worth noting that in his haste to make it appear that the MacBook was his, our thief used his real name when creating his new user account on the computer.
After having the laptop returned to her by the police, our client brought her MacBook to us, desperate to see if there was anything that we could do to salvage a nearly disastrous situation.
After a quick analysis, we discovered that we would indeed be capable of recovering all of this lost data for our client. With the aid of some awesome data recovery software – not to mention years of training – we were able to recover every last picture, document, and other previously “lost” file, including a rather impressive music collection.
We then removed all traces of what the thief did to the computer, and got an up-to-date version of MacOS installed – 10.12.6 for those of you keeping track.
The client was exceedingly happy to not only have her fully-functional computer back, but all of her data was back where it belonged. Data which she will now be sure to keep a current backup of.
We were able to get all of this was done in about 3 business days. Less time than it took the police to recover the laptop in the first place.
The moral of this story is threefold: 1) Never leave your laptop in the car unattended. Not even for “a few minutes”. 2) Always have a recent backup of your data. and 3) Whenever you run into a computer problem, your friends at No Ware have you covered.