What would you expect to pay......

for someone to back up your data erase and install a new system on a Macbook then put you data back. How many hours would this take?

Thanks

 

[akirk]

Depends on complexity of data (i.e. do you have to go into software to export settings / etc. or just back up a single folder)
The whole process can take 2 - 4 hours, but you wouldn't necessarily charge a fixed hourly rate for that as for much of the time the computer is doing its own thing...

check with your local mac store for a price - they may do fixed price upgrades

Alasdair

 

Depends on complexity of data (i.e. do you have to go into software to export settings / etc. or just back up a single folder)
The whole process can take 2 - 4 hours, but you wouldn't necessarily charge a fixed hourly rate for that as for much of the time the computer is doing its own thing...

check with your local mac store for a price - they may do fixed price upgrades

Alasdair

My sons local place wants £80 per hour and say it will take 2 hours. That seems an awful lot of money to store word/excel files, photos, itunes and then put it all back once its had all the rubbish wiped off.

 

[Jim2k]

I wouldnt be paying 80 an hour for that kind of work. I can imagine it wouild take a few hours though.

 

[sjdev]

My sons local place wants £80 per hour and say it will take 2 hours. That seems an awful lot of money to store word/excel files, photos, itunes and then put it all back once its had all the rubbish wiped off.

£640 day rate? Nice!

Shop around

 

[pcproblems]

Crikey, that's expensive

 

[stugster]

If they really knew what they were doing with their macs they could do that in about 15 minutes.

 

[Jim2k]

If they really knew what they were doing with their macs they could do that in about 15 minutes.

Blimey, thats a quick install of an OS. Are you sure?!

 

[RBS]

My sons local place wants £80 per hour and say it will take 2 hours. That seems an awful lot of money to store word/excel files, photos, itunes and then put it all back once its had all the rubbish wiped off.

More like £40 per hour. 80 seems to be rip off.

 

[nr-ts]

£80 an hour is a bit steep given that most of it will be watching a busy cursor...
The OSX reinstall is circa 15-20 mins, however depending on how much data you have and the method of intermediate storage used will determine the time taken for the backup. If you're going to throw tens of gigabytes of data onto a USB storage device then it'll be a long wait for the data both of and back onto the laptop. Probably quickest to copy over gigabit ethernet to a shared folder on another computer then back again as that can be faster - but ultimately its all down to the chosen method.

You mentioned an erase an re-install.. as an alternative and if you're feeling a bit bolder you could buy an portable external USB harddisk (2.5" SATA) approx £30-40 for a 320GB, remove your original disk from the macbook swapping it into the external harddisk case. Put new drive into the macbook, OSX reinstall on the new drive then connect up your original disk in the external case and use Apple Migration Assistant to move your programs/data/stuff back onto the fresh harddisk. You come out of it with a working external USB hard disk for time machine backups for not much money. Just a thought.

 

[JohnnyCash]

A small independent shop should be able to do it for £20-30... its a very simple job and most of the time they wouldn't actually be doing anything, just working on something else while they waited.

If you're doing it because the Mac itself is developing faults or errors, a Mac store will more than likely do it all free.

 

[stugster]

Blimey, thats a quick install of an OS. Are you sure?!

As JohnnyCash rightly pointed out, most of the time isn't spent at the machine. There's no hard-core configuration done, and because it's based on unix, most of the stuff is just file manipulation rather than registry crap.

 

[pcproblems]

A bit like a Ubuntu install, does it all by itself

 

[Jeff Knows]

Like others have said, 15 minutes. Wouldn't pay more than £30 for that. Then again, you could hop on over to JeffKnows.com and we'll walk you through it for nothing

 

£80 an hour is a bit steep given that most of it will be watching a busy cursor...
The OSX reinstall is circa 15-20 mins, however depending on how much data you have and the method of intermediate storage used will determine the time taken for the backup. If you're going to throw tens of gigabytes of data onto a USB storage device then it'll be a long wait for the data both of and back onto the laptop. Probably quickest to copy over gigabit ethernet to a shared folder on another computer then back again as that can be faster - but ultimately its all down to the chosen method.

You mentioned an erase an re-install.. as an alternative and if you're feeling a bit bolder you could buy an portable external USB harddisk (2.5" SATA) approx £30-40 for a 320GB, remove your original disk from the macbook swapping it into the external harddisk case. Put new drive into the macbook, OSX reinstall on the new drive then connect up your original disk in the external case and use Apple Migration Assistant to move your programs/data/stuff back onto the fresh harddisk. You come out of it with a working external USB hard disk for time machine backups for not much money. Just a thought.

It's my sons machine and i have passed on your comments. Thanks. Not sure he'll have the first clue how to do it, but i've passed them on

 

A small independent shop should be able to do it for £20-30... its a very simple job and most of the time they wouldn't actually be doing anything, just working on something else while they waited.

If you're doing it because the Mac itself is developing faults or errors, a Mac store will more than likely do it all free.

Would that price for an independent still be the same in London?
His laptop was the house communal laptop for 6 months when the house PC broke. So all the crap that comes with that needs wiping off.

 

Like others have said, 15 minutes. Wouldn't pay more than £30 for that. Then again, you could hop on over to JeffKnows.com and we'll walk you through it for nothing

I'll send him your link. Appreciate it !

 

[belliez]

This is something we do for a fixed price charge of £44.99. It includes data backup, re-install of OS then data restore. Check our website at www.TheLaptopFixers.com.

This would normally take between 2-6 hours depending on the amount of data being backed up and restored.

Why did you want to do this? Things running a bit slow or having problems starting up?

 

[garyk]

You can get carbon cooy cloner for free which will take a complete image backup of your hard drive, I used this recently for example when upgrading the harddrive in my macbook. Or even use OS X, do an install, it will recognise the existing OS which you can then back up to a (bootable) image on say an external drive.

Not that tricky.

 

[dagaul101]

If you can find out what some other firms are willing to pay, that will give you a good estimate