About a year ago I bought a wonderful external 2TB Seagate Black Armor hard drive which I felt sure would allow me great peace of mind since I’d never again have to worry about lost data.

Actually it worked quite well until about a month ago. At 9:00 a.m. each day, it would back up any data added since the previous day. But it got so that the scheduled daily back-ups were failing most of the time. After about a dozen failures, a week ago, I figured that I’d clear it off and start over. I deleted a year of back-ups (but not before I’d made a series of small back-ups on 4GB jump drives.)

Over the past few days, I’ve reinstalled the software multiple times but it’s working worse than it was.

I’ve tried everything I can think of. A full back-up can take a day and a half to run to run and I can’t use my computer while it’s doing the initial back-up. At first, I got several hours into it before would fail, but always it stopped, and I have to start over. I keep thinking, “Maybe I just need to tweak this.” So I’d do some small change and try again.

Now it’s stopping only a few minutes into a back-up. I’ve wasted about a week. I am at a loss. The Seagate site explains that there’s a three year warranty, but the website warns that, if you send the drive to them and the problem isn’t with the drive, they’ll send it back to you and charge you for their time. So I keep testing.

I’ve finally given up and emailed their customer service department in hopes that they can offer a suggestion but I envision a whole department of “Peggys.”

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Monday, August 8, 2011 – 3:30 p.m.

I just got off the phone after many hours with Seagate. They are the company which offers my 2TB hard drive back-up. Yup, they got back to me this a.m. by email, and I called them. They have been very helpful.

I spent the whole morning working with their (U.S. based) service department trying to trouble-shoot and see if the problems I’m having are because of their drive or my computer. Many hours later, the two techs I worked with finally determined that the problem is with the back-up drive so they are sending me a whole new set-up.

I will pay a $9.95 service fee which will cover the UPS cost both directions. I’ll have a brand new unit. I can keep both units for 30 days, so I can take my time and move the videos and photos I’d backed up.

I hate to think of all the time I’ve wasted, but at least I found it wasn’t “me” and they’re the ones saying I should send the drive back.