I was just watching a video on cnet about a data recovery company named “DriveSavers“, they charge a minimum of $400.00 to recover lost data.  The company claims that if they don’t recover your data they don’t get paid.  I’m always skeptical of these services for so many reasons, one is probably the price they are charging, after all DriveSavers knows how important your data is, and they know you’ll pay good money to get it back.

Personally I wouldn’t pay this much money without first investigating alternatives.  My personal recommendation is a tool from grc.com called SpinRite.   SpinRite has a huge customer following and even has a page devoted just to customer testimonials. $89 for first time customers and cheap upgrades for existing customers is a lot better than a $400.00 minimum.

The other thing that’s important to remember in addition to backing up your data is that you are advised to run SpinRite occasionally (say every six months) to monitor drive health and prevent data loss.

So if you know of someone with a hard drive failure or you have another computer with a failed hard drive, I recommend you try SpinRite instead of paying a monster amount of cash.