Hi Mark K:
Good point. Some phone companies do use proprietary formatting, making it difficult to use traditional tools on them.
It's true that some of these drives can't just be dropped into a computer and have them work.
However, it's not accurate to say they can't be
"ghosted", even with a proprietary format.
Bits are bits, and there are tools to copy one drive to another, regardless of the format.
That said, your point is right on. It's usually better to just go ahead and replace the parts to get the customer going quickly.
But there are rare occasions when the customer might be better served by recovering their data. My yardstick, and the question I always ask the customer, is: Will it take you more money and time to manually recover your info (or, as in this case, more money if the voicemails are lost) than it will to recover the data?
I've had cases where critical data was lost, and it was a better business decision to recover it than to let it go. In one situation, the "data" was a series of voicemails that were critical to a court case, and needed to be recovered.
The cost of that recovery was far less than the loss of the lawsuit would have been.
But, I do agree with you that time is money. The cost/benefit analysis should be a consideration too.
