Ditto. It's the only reason I bought this:
Plug it in between your (land-line) phone and the mic-in jack on a computer, a cassette recorder, or anything else with a mic-in jack, and save your precious phone messages before they disappear.
Posted on 03/23/2012 12:06:48 PM PDT by US Navy Vet
For 51-year-old Faron Butler, the thing he cherished most after his daughter's death was being able to hear her voice.
"Every time I had a bad day or just wanted to listen to her I'd go through my old voicemails," Butler told ABCNews.com through tears. "I had one that I'd play over and over again. She'd be saying 'Daddy, I love you and I miss you.'"
He said he was shocked when a few weeks ago he went to hear that familiar voice, only to find out the voicemail had been erased
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Sad yes but? I copied the voice mails I wanted to save off line.
That sucks.
There had to be a better way to back something like that up than just leaving it on a proprietary voicemail system.
SnakeDoc
In fairness to the company, there is no way for them to know the value of old voicemails. . .in hindsight. .there are ways to record them and get them in MP3 format for your own archives. . .but sad, nonetheless. . .he’s grieving over losing his daughter. . nothing sadder than a parent losing a child.
Dad has a voice mail from Mom that is similar. I really need to record that before something happens to it.
But the phone company is really being insensitive here. They have that backed up some where. They should make the guy a disk of the voice mails, and charge him $20 or $50 or whatever it costs. They guy would pay and that would be the end of it.
How much ya want to bet that the Phone Company is looking for these Voice Mails via BACK-Up tapes right now.
But Butler, who works for a labor union, said compensation isn't enough. He's hired attorney Chris Crew to file a negligence suit against the company, demanding them to tap into archives and retrieve the voicemails.
You know, I'm sorry you lost a link to your daughter. But suing for negligence is way beyond the pale.
It’s sad but it’s not proper for a lawsuit. Data stored elsewhere isn’t forever, if he wanted it forever he should have stored it locally. My cable/ phone company has an online interface, I can download things straight, probably something similarly easy for him, he didn’t bother, not their fault.
Sad? Yes. But it will probably be good for him in the long-run. The man needs to get used to not hearing his daughter anymore. She’s gone.
Wish him the best!
I am so sorry for this being erased, but the guy was not wise in not recording multiple copies. I would have done this for the very reason of it getting erased.
Sad. A family member deliberately erased my dad’s last message to me off my answering machine. She meant well, but I’ve always wished I could have that back.
wow... he didn’t save copies... that is whats really sad.
I have a video with my wife on it (she died of liver cancer at 29). I’ve kept it since the mid 90s. It’s gone with me in every place I’ve lived since. It’s also unwatched. Because I know she is gone and that’s the way it is. I don’t need to watch it to get through the rest of life. But I know it’s there. And that’s good enough for me.
If this man needed his recordings to do what he has to do, then so be it. I’m sorry for both of his losses.
I saved my copies by recording them on a cassette player. Not great but it worked.
I had a voice-mail from my wife who died. I listened to it every so often for a year. There does come a time when it is time to move on.
When our son was stationed in Japan while in the navy, I would listen to his voice mails. Yes, he called when he could, but on those long weeks when the ship was out and he couldn’t call, it was a comfort to hear his voice.
I grieve for this man. Several family members have lost children. I can only imagine what a blessing it would be to be able to hear their child’s voice again.
Hey I completely understand Norm and I’m sorry to hear about your loss. I was just stating my opinion that it might be a beneficial thing for him as far as accepting what happened.
Grief is a complicated thing so I understand if people disagree with my opinion. Folks like you make good points while others just hurl profanity because they FEEL instead of THINK.
Oh, look! The family has photos, even video of the dear departed. It’s not like the family doesn’t have other ways to remember her.
But if you watch the story at the link, what is really at issue is the wireless phone company failed to tell the man that switching calling plans might cause the old voicemails to be deleted. The company has since apologized for not mentioning this and I’m sure if any backup recording of this still exists, they will find it.
Otherwise, this seems like a lot of drama over nothing. The daughter has passed on. The family certainly has other treasures of her they can continue to remember her with (note to dad - make backup copies!).
But Daddy really needs to buck up and move on, not hire lawyers and try to find a jackpot. If the recordings meant so much to him, there are quick and dirty ways to make a recording even if the phone company wouldn’t offer them.
I don’t understand this. I have a cell phone and Verizon is my provider. I have a voice mail from an old buddy of mine who sadly passed away back in September. I hit the ‘’play’’ button anytime I want to listen to it and hit the ‘’save’’ button and it’ll be there forever.
I feel sorry for the boob, but this is ridiculous. You buy a cassette tape recorder and record them.
Learned helplessness. Then when you do something stupid or fail to do something smart you sue.
There are Waaaay to many lawyers in this country sitting around thinking up shit to sue over.
Very sad for this to occur... It’s unfortunate he didn’t know to coordinate with the phone company to hold the voice mails until he could somehow get them duplicated.
I don’t know what he believes a lawsuit will accomplish, whatever, since the company said the v-mails weren’t retrievable.
My heart goes out to him and his family.
whatever=however
A little rough there, don't you think?? People aren't always going to do fully rational things when they're going through the loss of a child.
There's "really gone forever" and then there's "We would have to dig through backups for a couple of hours so it's cheaper for us to just apologize and shrug". Getting the lawyers involved suddenly makes digging through backups the cheaper alternative.
Or maybe not. If you really want to keep it make your own copy.
Ditto. It's the only reason I bought this:
Plug it in between your (land-line) phone and the mic-in jack on a computer, a cassette recorder, or anything else with a mic-in jack, and save your precious phone messages before they disappear.
Some states both parties have to have knowledge that the phone is tapped. Some states only the person tapping their phone needs to know.
I had a friend that tapped his phone cause he was going through a divorce and thought the wife was also having an affair...She called the phone company to find out if her phone was tapped and they checked and said NO....but it was..
If he didn’t try to keep them himself, they must not have been that important.
A bit off-topic, but most phone companies have on-line access from which you can copy voicemails. I once received a misdirected threatening call, downloaded it as a .wav file and emailed it to the police. I was able to better hear what he was going to do to me (or in reality the person for whom it was intended) on my PC than on the phone, also.
A year ago I was cleaning up old emails on the phone. My wife likes to stack them up. I was deleting anything over 90 days without listening. Found out one was from my daughter calling from college that was special for my wife. After I was yelled at I hopped on line and found that I could restore it from the delete bucket. I assume that gets emptied often so it’s not fail safe.
I saved them all to tapes and recently digitized them and saved them to CD.
More likely tens of thousands of dollars if it is even possible.
'Butler said. "Just complete negligence on their part."'
The negligence was on his part. He and is lawyer should be tossed out of court on their heads and billed for the courts time.
My wife’s voice is on the company voicemail. She pasted away a year ago the 31st of this month.
I call it once in awhile. I also have lots of videos from all of our vacations.
So that gives him license to sue people because of his stupidity/negligence?
I’ve had enough of this crap of people suing others endlessly because they’re too stupid to responsibly take care of their own affairs.
Perhaps, but how many times did he listen to it? 5 times? 10 times? How often do you listen to it before you think, “Hey I ought to make a long term copy of this.” These things are not supposed to be his version of permanent storage. They’re supposed to be listen to the message once, then erase.
I hope his lawyer gets pounded hard for a frivolous lawsuit.
Tear jerker?
Crocodile tears, maybe.
My daughter was killed in an auto accident ten years ago. She had left a message on her phone answering machine, “Not home right now but will be soon, please leave your message”. I immediately disconnected the phone and keep it in a safe place. Every now and then I get it out and just listen to her voice. Her son who was ten at the time is so glad I kept it - said it’s getting harder and harder to remember what his mom’s voice sounded like. It is sad to lose a kiddo but I will see her in heaven again one day, as will her son.
I suggest you have them converted to DVD because the information stored on the tape degrades over time.
No.. it doesn`t. But he lost a child.. how about you cut him a bit of slack?
“But Butler, ...said compensation isn’t enough. He’s hired attorney Chris Crew to file a negligence suit against the company, demanding them to tap into archives and retrieve the voicemails.”
Seems like a number of FReepers didn’t read the whole story.
He’s suing the company to force them to try to retrieve the messages. It’s not just about $.
And it also says that the girl’s sister used to listen to messages too.
He was foolish not to copy the messages, but I feel really sorry for him.
I feel terrible for you.
You make me want to start saving messages from my folks now, while they’re still alive.
Cut him some slack?
After suing people for his stupidity/negligence?
No.
My sympathy ends when he tries to spread his pain to others via lawyers and the courts.
Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Burnable CDs and DVDs die over time as well.
To really keep them indefinitely you have to make several copies and then copy those again every few years over and over to be sure. Along the way formats also become obsolete so you have to move them forward to the latest and greatest whatever it is...
The voice mail system would have had links to all of the messages he had stored. You're not having to go digging through multiple backups. You go to one back up of the Voice mail system prior to the date he lost his records and you retrieve them from there.
They would certainly have a current back up system in case of system failure. How long they keep backups is questionable, but I bet they have one.
They would have had “links”?
And they “certainly” would have made backup copies too...
Well maybe. Maybe not.
Many systems like this simply use redundancy. Systems that run in parallel and if one goes down another takes over that has a mirror of all the data. You issue a command to delete data and that data is deleted by all the machines at the same time - data gone.
Now lets say they did do backups beyond redundancy. In systems like this if they do have backups they are for recovery due to a major failure, not recovering a tiny isolated piece of data. In the event of failure they restore the entire system from a backup or backups. Without restoring the entire system they often don’t have access to individual records.
And last but not least. The man should have contacted the CEO or other high level person in a position of power in the company and told them his story and see what they could do about it if anything. Instead he went the lawyer route. Lawyers are weapons of mass destruction as far as I’m concerned. Any goodwill or willing to help is done at that point.
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