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Hot take: cloning drives with free software burned me twice, paid tools zero times. Am I wrong to just charge for it now?
Did a batch of 6 office PCs over a weekend using a free imaging tool I won't name. 2 of the 6 came back within a week with boot errors and one had a corrupted user profile. Redid them with a paid tool and no callbacks in 3 weeks.
But here is where I get stuck. Half the techs I know say free tools are fine if you know what you are doing and I just got unlucky. The other half say stop being cheap and bill the client for a tool that works.
I get that free tools pay my bills too. But I also hate eating the labor when a clone goes bad.
What do you all do, do you charge the client a line item for imaging or do you eat it and keep your rates flat?
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terry_barnes9d ago
Two out of six failing is a bad batch, not proof free tools are trash. I ran free clones on whole labs for years and maybe lost a drive a year, so the tool matters less than your steps and the hardware itself. Bill the client for the imaging either way, because your time is the product no matter what software does the work.
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