Documenting the last four months
David Miller, a freelance TV producer and director, used a video camera to document the last four months of his father’s battle with cancer. Each day, Miller was careful to backup the footage he’d recorded to his father’s network-attached storage (NAS) drive.
“From the day of his diagnosis, my father asked me to film every part of the process — the good times, the sad times, everything,” Miller, 34, recalled from his home in Boulder, Colorado. “I was happy to honor his wishes.”
Three years ago, Miller’s father, Brian, passed away at the age of 60. Miller waited a few months before he felt emotionally ready to review some of that footage, only to find that he couldn’t retrieve any of the files from the drive.
The video files I had put on that hard drive did not show up.
“I plugged in the drive and it didn’t work,” Miller said. “All of the video files I had stored on the drive just didn’t show up. In my head, I remember thinking, ‘Maybe this isn’t the right time to view this.’ When I felt ready to check again, the drive still wouldn’t work.”
William Merriman works in Seagate’s customer technical support department in Oklahoma City.
Miller sent the drive to some tech-savvy friends, but none of them could figure out how to access the files. In December, Miller called the drive’s manufacturer, Seagate, for help. Miller was put in touch with William Merriman, an engineering technician in Seagate’s customer technical support department in Oklahoma City.
Compassion, kindness and real concern for helping me resolve my issue.
Spending hours on the phone to carefully walk through and troubleshoot each possible problem and solution, Merriman was able to help Miller unlock the data on the drive — a Seagate GoFlex Home, an early forerunner to the current Seagate Personal Cloud.
“From the moment I called Seagate, I was greeted with nothing but compassion, kindness and real concern for helping me resolve my issue,” said Miller. “William was just excellent. He was pragmatic and thorough and very patient.”
The main problem stemmed from the fact that Miller didn’t know the user ID that his father had used for accessing files on the drive.
The data was still on the drive
“The data was still on the drive, but without the correct user ID, he couldn’t see any of that data,” Seagate’s Merriman explained.
The solution was to convert the GoFlex Home from a network drive to a USB-connected drive, by using a GoFlex Desktop Adapter. Merriman walked Miller through the process for doing that, enabling him to transfer the files from the drive to his own laptop computer. Once that was done, Miller, at long last, could see everything he’d recorded with his father.
“It was such a wonderful feeling to see all those videos again,” said Miller, who’s worked as a director on the History Channel’s Pawn Stars, among other shows. “When I opened the drive and saw everything there, I started crying. This drive is the most valuable thing that me and my family own. It holds precious times and memories with my father that we can never get back. The value in being able to unlock that drive and get those memories back is immeasurable.”
Although he was happy to play a part in helping a customer retrieve some precious memories, Merriman said his work wasn’t out of the norm for his team.
I could definitely relate to his predicament
“I’ve got pictures of my grandfather from World War II that I’d hate to lose,” he said, “so I could definitely relate to his predicament. Helping customers out is just something we all do here, every day. It could have been anyone on the team who answered his call — it just happened to be me. He would’ve gotten the same level of service and support from any one of us.”
Merriman’s supervisor, Franklin Eho, agreed.
“Will’s work that day is a good reminder that every customer is important — big or small,” said Eho, a network support supervisor. “In this case, the solution turned out to be pretty straightforward. But it shows that even small fixes can have a pretty big impact on someone’s life.”
Mark Whitby, Seagate’s SVP of branded products, said the story also is a reminder that Seagate is more than a storage-products company.
“David’s story is about Seagate’s full commitment to help consumers create, preserve and share their most precious content,” Whitby said. “This philosophy has been at the heart of the branded organization for years now — to develop and bring people the products and solutions that help breathe life into data and realize its full potential. This story makes me proud of what we do.”
