Fortunately, I have a Kirby vacuum at the house with electronics attachments that I can use to get into the smallest areas safely. Not the ideal economical choice for starting out, but something to keep in mind if you go larger scale.

I have not met a single PC that didn’t need a good cleaning when I get involved.

Also — with the rise of the netbook, you should probably focus your toolkit on USB drives.

For what it’s worth — my attorney used Apple’s as a template.

**DO NOT MAKE A BACKUP WITHOUT THEIR PERMISSION. IT IS ******* ILLEGAL.**

And, if you do this full-time, you should invest in E&O Insurance at ~$1k-5k/yr. It sounds expensive but it’s the legitimate way of doing things. If you continue to grow, at some point you *will* be sued. If you want to continue as a company afterward… you’ll need the E&O. General liability won’t cut it.

I wouldn’t recommend this.

Anyway, people who are genuinely concerned about their own privacy should simply let their repair guy know that their data is private, and have it backed up, so there is no need for the repair guy to do it. If I have some files that I want to keep private, I would back it up before I send it for repair.

What do you do to protect your customers from this eventuality, and how would you defend your sneaking a backup in court should it come to that?

The trick: professional marketing.

Tip: better technicians can do the same work in a lot less time.

Note to consumers: in-store service is vastly better than on-site, assuming the company cares enough to take ownership of your problems. we started on-site only and the goal was often to make the customer happy and get out! after opening a store location, we would proactively test hardware, apply every software update we could find, etc… all for less than on-site visits. why? because we could multi-task and work on a half dozen machines simultaneously.