Many places offer free analysis, and you only pay after they characterize what they can recover.

Hard drives will fail

Data Recovery Services

Seagate Data Recovery

http://www.seagate.com/services-software/recover/in-lab-recovery/

DriveSavers

Oliver got great customer service from DriveSavers.

Tip, if using DriveSavers

Ask if they are prepared to cut you a special deal if you are willing to wait 2-3 weeks (10-15 work days vs. 5-7 work days) for a turn-around. On 8/21/14, they offered us this deal to cut the cost of a recovery by $500 (from ~$2,000).

The extra large time window gives their engineers a catch-as-catch-can approach, as they deal with 80-100 shipments/ day. And when it's slow, they can apparently offer this "hidden" promotion. They only made this offer after they had done a preliminary (free) evaluation of the actual drive and gave us a much more tightly bounded cost estimate. Also, they reported that what they saw gave them the confidence to report of a high probability of success (increasing the chance they'd get paid since they don't get paid if not data recovered!)

Work situations so far (data points)

The following instances gave us experience with their customer service, but we never followed through with the data recovery:

2nd instance, 8/2014: External USB drive failed, and user had not backup, per se for information he felt was valuable. The first quote was ~$700-2,300. When they got the drive, it was in the ~$2K range. User didn't want to do that, so drive sent back, all at no cost to us.
- If you ask them to provide a drive to send your data back (instead of providing one to them yourself), they charge $109 for a 1TB external USB hard drive
1st instance, 5/13: We ended up not using the service in one complicated instance (Multiple drives with h/w RAID). They helped us determine if we wanted to recover a hard drive based on likely price, outcomes, and our fall-back.

Info on DriveSavers

http://drivesavers.com/

1-800-440-1904

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Your DriveSavers Program ID#: DS82034

Reference your exclusive Program ID# for automatic discounts and benefits when engaging DriveSavers. All members of your organization can use this number to ensure the following:

- Automatic Discounts up to 27%
- Free Evaluation Service
- Free Shipping Box or Label
- No Data, No Charge Policy
- Guaranteed Secure Facility
* SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, NIST, GLBA, SOX, FAR 52.224-2, and ISO 17799 compliant!

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