Originally Posted by Overbear

Let me give you a few pointers.

1)ALL data companies will charge betwene $500 and $1000 just to LOOK at the drive. That is not recovery just to look it over and say "yep we can get the data off"

2)Costs run between $5-$500 a meg of recovered data, depending on if its RAID, if there is fire damage, etc...

Last time I had a data recover was at work, we had 130megs recovered (files not backed up) at the cost of $8500. So you need to decide if the data is THAT important.

Next time I would suggest you put up a server or some kind of redundant backup system. I personally here at home run a windows 2003 server with raid 5+1 hotswap, dual backed up to a raid 0(mirrored) external dual USB drive. This way I can loose a total of 2 drives on the raid AND one on the backup raid and still have my data safe. Then again I do have over 3t of data here at home.