Seagate in Australia

I’ve had a Seagate external hard disk drive for years and it still works well – the only problem I had was I accidentally threw out the power cable (doh!) and had great difficulty with the folk at Seagate to understand the product I had and whether they had a replacement cable.

Then I had a Maxtor One Touch III which still works fault-free today. I use it when I’m travelling to take a lot of my work files with me. It’s only 80gb (that was big when new!) but does the job.

Earlier this year I upgraded the external hard drive I use for backups to a 1TB Maxtor. And it’s already making a very sick sound. Searching the internet I decided to stop trying to make it work by hooking it up to other computers as this may be causing damage. So, in my travels I found a news item that said Seagate had introduced Data Recovery Services to Australia a few years ago.

I don’t want to lose the data on my drive and I’ve waited a couple weeks to see if I need what’s on there. Turns out I do! Next step – find Seagate in Australia.

Boy, has it been hard to find Seagate in Australia!

I followed a number of web links to track them down, including the yellow pages, and after dialling about 7 numbers, finally ended up overseas.

Fact is, it seems Seagate no longer has a physical presence in Australia .

So, to make a warranty claim you need to go online at seagate.com/warranty and if you need to get data recovery completed, obviously Seagate no longer do that here and have no recommended partner. The good news is that by having a Data Recovery expert open up the box and try to retrieve what is on the drive will not void the warranty itself – you just need to get a letter from the Data Recovery Centre to go with any warranty claim.

As at July 2011 the number to contact Seagate is 1800 147 201.

Good luck!

ps moral of the story is – always have TWO backups – one on your HDD and one off site, maybe in the cloud for business critical data.