Data Merge & Combine Operation Costing

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GreenLED

Limp Gawd
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Mar 1, 2014
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I have a client who brought me 12 external hard drives. They wanted me to go through them and merge and combine everything into one drive. Sounds simple, no? It hasn't been that.

There is a lot of manual work because much of the drives have different data types on them.

My question: In your opinion, what is a good method to go about charging for such services? Data transfer speed? Total time taken on project? Flat fee? Has chewed up 10+ hours of my time so far. It's not a simple copy process because files fail or you have to come back and check on things. Thoughts?
 
You could 'combine' them with drive bender or drive pool pretty easily assuming they are just ntfs
 
Good suggestion as far as the technical aspect, but it doesn't answer the question how much to charge. Also, unfortunately, the individual I am working with is definitely not a technically-minded person. They would be thoroughly confused browsing around a plethora of folder trees to get at their data. In short, this is more of a data organization job and requires either some automatic and some manual folder management. Does anyone have any thoughts on the costing part of this?
 
Not the same industry - but for my automotive test lab at work we charge technician time and machine time.
Technician time would be for hours actively spent setting up or working on a test station based on the average of the fully burdened hourly rate of our technicians.
Machine time would be an hourly rate for when it is running unsupervised which takes into account electricity, repair/maintenance (annual cost converted to hourly rate per test station), rent, etc.
Then add overhead and a profit margin and you should have an amount to charge.

If you plan on invoicing them make sure to document the time and ideally you've discussed a not-to-exceed amount for how much they are willing to spend on this task.
 
grim4593 said:
Not the same industry - but for my automotive test lab at work we charge technician time and machine time.
Technician time would be for hours actively spent setting up or working on a test station based on the average of the fully burdened hourly rate of our technicians.
Machine time would be an hourly rate for when it is running unsupervised which takes into account electricity, repair/maintenance (annual cost converted to hourly rate per test station), rent, etc.
Then add overhead and a profit margin and you should have an amount to charge.

If you plan on invoicing them make sure to document the time and ideally you've discussed a not-to-exceed amount for how much they are willing to spend on this task.
Click to expand...

That is an EXCELLENT reply! I truly appreciate this level of response. I don't normally take on this line of work, even though I have the necessary equipment, setup and software configured and ready to use. Many of my clients just say "whatever it costs", but I really would like to have some logic to the method. I REALLY like your approach and I think I will integrate some aspects of your reply.

Earlier today I had thought to do something like this (draft thinking mind you).

So far they have 3TB total transferred so far.

If I give every device the benefit of the doubt on transfer speed, say 100 MB/s even though they may all be all over the place, I thought I might come up with a reasonable calculation for how much time it should take, multiply that times an hourly rate and call it good. What do you think about this simplified approach? I know it's not perfect, but I don't think any method really is. Plus, there's the task of explaining to a laymen how I came up with the figure.
 
GreenLED said:
It's not a simple copy process because files fail or you have to come back and check on things. Thoughts?
Click to expand...
Maybe I will sound stupid but are you using Windows explorer copy for this ?

Maybe there is not enough file/drive to use something complicated, but there is many very simple program that will handle retry on file copy and can insure copy integrity, copy every files with a list of extensions or exclude files with an extension and so on, if you do not make your own script for it.

Windows got better over time, but still probably not ideal if it is more complicated than single folder copy-paste (or even there if it is relatively slow for the amount of files/size that it will require a long time).
 
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I agree with LukeTbk - Make sure you are using software that doesn't halt on errors. I usually use FreeFileSync or Robocopy for that type of task which also lets you resume if it gets halted part way.
 
LukeTbk said:
Maybe I will sound stupid but are you using Windows explorer copy for this ?

Maybe there is not enough file/drive to use something complicated, but there is many very simple program that will handle retry on file copy and can insure copy integrity, copy everything files with a list of extensions or exclude files with an extension and so on, if you do not make your own script for it.

Windows got better over time, but still probably no ideal if it is more complicated than single folder copy-paste.
Click to expand...
You do not sound stupid my friend. Yes, I have looked into and downloaded several of these programs. Some of them are good and others are not. I do have scripts setup that take care of some of this, but honestly, I haven't seen any that will handle ALL situations. I am charging the customer for the utility of utilizing my equipment and for them to not have to bother with ANY of the problems that you will inevitably run into on such a project. For example, what if the copy process runs into bad sectors? Now, it is a data recovery project. There is just so many factors to consider. I want a basic formula for transfers that don't require some type of special intervention to complete.

I do take your point though. I have settled on RoboCopy with GUI front end that eases some of the setup process in getting transfers going. The only shortfall I have with RC is I can't get a good "time to completion" estimate.

This is the entire reason I would rather sacrifice some profit in exchange for a "average MB/s" estimated time formula that covers all the bases. If I had to intervene a few times, but I was able to get the job done, I should be paid per hour based on the total amount of data successfully transferred.
 
Copy all to one drive (maybe buy a 10tb drive), overwrite older with newer
Then combine any folders...pics all in pics, docs all in docs, music in music, etc
 
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