Ai Networks - DriveCrash AI Networks Incompetance or Fraud? Reader be the judge! Irvine, California

After venting I realize that most folks dont have time to read my whole story, so I will summarize with excerpts below. Even if you dont read the synopsis, you should know that you should NEVER HIRE AI NETWORKS/DRIVECRASH/Lou Zeleznik!

1. After some research and numerous phone calls, we decided to send the external harddrive containing our 4 years of work to DriveCrash/Ai Networks/Lou Zeleznik. The original (sight unseen) estimate given by Lou to recover the data was $750 with a turn-around time of 2-3 weeks.

2. [Total to date = $1,500 & 1 week.]

3. [Total to date = $4,000 & 5 weeks]

4. [Total to date = $4,000 + shipping + $200 external harddrive & 12 weeks]

5. [Total to date = $4,300 + What Little Bit of Hair I had Left & 13 weeks]

6. [Total to date = $4,300 & 16 weeks]

7. I placed my last call today, 5 months and $4,300 later, only to discover that we will only receive the data originally sent to us (15% of what was promised). Anyone know a good lawyer in Irvine, CA?

BEGIN TRUE STORY:

In October of 2009, we lost our server RAID harddrive configuration that contained 4 years of my partner's and my civil engineering work. The good news was that we had worked hard to keep all of our on-going projects well above schedule, and we had redundant back-ups in the form of a dual, external harddrive setup. The bad news was that both of those external drives decided to fail within 24 hours of the server. During this 24-hour period, we were able to completely copy the server harddrive to one of the back-up harddrives to ensure we had the most current data. (Our IT guy blames power surges for the failures, as the probability of 3 harddrive failures in 24 hours is equivillant to winning the lottery 3 weeks in a row).

After some research and numerous phone calls, we decided to send the external harddrive containing our 4 years of work to DriveCrash/Ai Networks/Lou Zeleznik. The original (sight unseen) estimate given by Lou to recover the data was $750 with a turn-around time of 2-3 weeks. This sounded reasonable, so we mailed the crashed Maxtor external 3 timezones west to Irvine, CA with the understanding that it could be too damaged to recover any data. Five days and +/- $750 later, Lou told us that it would take another $750 to get the drive into the clean room to determine exactly what could be reocovered. We agreed.

[Total to date = $1,500 & 1 week.]

Four weeks passed (moving into Thanksgiving Holidays), and after each daily call that we made to Lou to check the status, we soon discovered that Lou is a master of saying a lot without telling us anything of substance. He would constantly spout technical jargon that he would contradict on our next phone call. It became obvious that he knew as much about data recovery as we did (next-to-nothing), but he FINALLY sent us a list of files that they would be able to recover. The "Good" list contained ALL of the files we considered critical with some other stuff that would be nice to get back. The cost to recover these files was +/- $2,500. This was more than we anticipated, but in light of the fact that it would save several months of work and keep our projects more-or-less on schedule, we once again agreed and sent payment with the understanding that it wold take around a week to finish the recovery.

[Total to date = $4,000 & 5 weeks]

ANOTHER 4 weeks passed (moving into Christmas Holidays!), and after too many phonecalls to count, Lou promised to ship our data. We attributed the 3 WEEK delivery delay to the holiday season despite Lou's reluctance to provide a tracking number. We FINALLY got our data via FedEx in the middle of January. We thought "Ok, this was a huge pain in the @$$, but it's over now!"

[Total to date = $4,000 + shipping + $200 external harddrive & 12 weeks]

After feverently tearing into the FedEx box and hooking up the drive, I doubt that you could imagine our dismay when we discovered that the harddrive shipped by Lou contained roughly 15% of the data that was originally listed in the "Good" list. To add insult to injury, the files that were recovered were only standard office forms that we re-created within a week of the crash. After a full day of running searches on the drive, we contacted Lou and told him that over 85% of the data was not present. His response was that we "needed to upgrade Quickbooks." After I explained that we are an ENGINEERING company and only used Quickbooks on a cursory basis, he said that he would have to "check with Engineering" (WTF??!!). I can honestly send you the email correspondances if you have doubts.

[Total to date = $4,300 + What Little Bit of Hair I had Left & 13 weeks]

I took a few days to cool off and called DriveCrash again. Lou was full of apologies and explained that this had never happened. He pleaded that they were re-working our data, and he promised that they could get it back to us. He also explained that they dumped data after 7 days, and we failed to notify them within 7 days of a problem. Again, I can send you the email correspondances if you have doubts.

Another week passed, and I called again. Lou promised again that the data would ship by the end of the week. I inquired if i needed to return the harddrive they sent, and his response was that it wouldn't arrive before they were ready to ship. I felt better, and agreed to wait to see what we get. ANOTHER week passes, and I call to check the status. Lou informs me that they need us to return their external harddrive so they can "retrieve data" from it.

[Total to date = $4,300 & 16 weeks]

Another two weeks go by, and I have spoken with everyone at DriveCrash that dares to answer my calls. More apologies, more agreements that the situation is ridiculous, more promises of delivery, and more promises of what will be recovered.

I placed my last call today, 5 months and $4,300 later, only to discover that we will only receive the data originally sent to us (15% of what was promised).

Anyone know a good lawyer in Irvine, CA?