I have been going through a fiasco recently. It’s not the normal one I would expect, but it is somewhat humorous. A few weeks ago, I had bought some software from a company called Stellar Information Systems, ltd. The reason I bought this software was because I tested their demo version, and it appeared that it would pull some data off a disk with a bad partition table.
After the demo worked, I paid $99 bucks to a company called Element5, an intermediate party for selling software for vendors. I spent the next 6 hours extracting data from the disk while my server was down. Everything looked like it was fine and dandy.
Around 2am, I my systems installed and all my files are moved over. I start to mess around with getting all my websites on it back up and running. This was my personal server so it had only a handful of high-priority websites / databases on it. I was relieved that some software was able to pull everything down.
Once I started to QA my work when the system was online, it was about 4:00 am. I noticed some very strange things going on. A couple of my source code and HTML files that were less then 2kb was corrupted. I was very curious of this because it was very random. I though maybe it was just one or two files. When I saw corrupt, I am not talking about total loss, but just strange things like this:
HJTCommerce.HJTMenu" Co+ behind="HJTMenu.ascx.cs"
The text should be “Codebehind=” not “Co+ behind”
So, that really got me nervous. I started looking around, and I saw this happening on thousands of other files, including small gif images and jpgs.
Now, I am totally freaked. I left the office at 4:00am, and got back in around 10:00am. I went to my system admin and said. “Ryan, I beg you to help me”. So, Ryan pulls out his linux toolset and starts go to work on the drive at his workstation. He uses a utility to rebuild the partition table. We stick it back into my computer and it boots up just as it normally would, just been offline for 24+ hours.
Ok, so now that you have the background, here is where the fun comes in.
I said, well, I just wasted my time with Stellar broken software, so I want my money back. I would not have asked if it did not screw up thousands of small files on my disk, but it did and on top of that wasted hours of valuable time while I was trying to restore my server.
First attempt:
I call Stellar on their toll-free phone number the Day after to get the refund process going. They tell me that the process to get a refund, I must first submit a tech support ticket explaining my problem. My response is more like “I need to open a tech support ticket to get a refund? Oookkk.. “
So, I send in my first support ticket. Let the games begin!
-----------------------------------------------
--- July 15th, 2007 – To Stellar Tech support ticket system
-----------------------------------------------
I attempted to use your software this week. It looks like it was working great, and we were recovering about 200 gigs of data off our disk. Once we spent 6 hours doing it while our server was offline, we realized that almost every file that was < 2kb was corrupt. There was no way we were going to manually fix 100k files. We had to go back to the original disk, where there was no corruption. We would like a refund on order number 137595265. I would like you to refund it before I put in a stop payment on my cc. Support was a joke also. Nobody wants to help, and hardly speaking any English.
-------------------------------------------------------
---- July 16, 2007 06:39 PM- To me -----
--------------------------------------------------------
Hi!
We apologize for all the inconveniences caused!
Regarding your concern, we would request you to please fill this Technical Form –
http://www.stellarinfo.com/support/please_answer.php
Please submit as many details as possible. This would help us collate all the data related to your issue and expedite our analysis of it.
Once we have all your details, we will try our level best to resolve your issue as soon as possible.
Please also remember to fill the ticket# while submitting the technical form.
Thanks for having patience and your kind cooperation!
Warm Regards,
Neeraj Neyol
Stellar Technical Executive
--------------------------------------------</