[Katsunami]

By the way: update regarding the Brother label printer.

Someone at customer care of the store woke up, after I sent them the message that I would start sending out complaints to consumer authorities and posting bad reviews at prominent review sites if nobody started to fix this problem by Friday Feb 12.

They finally gave me a call to get this fixed. After I told them the story, they went to check it out and then called me back.

"Brother gave you the wrong number. That is the case number, not a ticket number. They never created the RMA ticket and thus won't accept a direct swap from us."
- "To be honest, I don't really care. There is no way for me to know this. I followed your procedure, which is convoluted as it is, and provided you the number Brother gave me. You have checked that this number indeed exists at Brother's customer care, and that should be enough."

OK, the lady on the other end of the line told me she understood, and that it was very inconvenient and such, so she offered that I could send the device back to the store (at their cost), and that they would, in one way or another, get a correctly working device back to me in a 'reasonable amount of time'. She wanted to know if I agreed with this offer.

Well yes. Wasn't that what I was asking from the start? The store doesn't need to do a one-to-one swap (it is not required by law), but they do need to resolve the problem in some sort of customer friendly way with no extra costs to me.

It seems they're finally going to do so. Now I'm just hoping that 'a reasonable amount of time' is not going to be 7 months. (The law states: about 10 working days.)

=== ===

So, the laptop is fixed.
My sister has got a new backup.
I put that same backup onto my mom's external drive.
The label printer is (hopefully) going to be fixed.

It was a very productive 'holiday', calling companies back and forth, getting stuck at home waiting for the technicians, and fixing other people's backups.