A sudden loss of data because of a faulty hard drive, power failure, or mechanical damage is a surprisingly common scenario. More than 140,000 hard drives fail weekly in the US alone! Even regular backups cannot protect all users from such a formidable number of failures. Fortunately, there are also many ways to deal with this problem: modern hard drive recovery tools, for instance, have achieved a sufficient level of effectiveness and in many cases provide a promising alternative to professional services. Data loss is a worst-case scenario for any business but "data recovery" (also known as datenrettung) is certainly possible given the technology available nowadays. If data recovery is indeed possible, how much does it cost? Surprisingly enough, this question has no simple answers.
What are the Factors that Affect the Prices?
In most cases, those companies, which specialize in the sphere of data restoration, avoid preliminary assessments. Why does it happen? One could have expected that services with powerful HDD recovery software and hardware have a standardized procedure for dealing with typical HDD failures. Nevertheless, the reality is more complicated. The costs of data restorations are affected by many factors, the most significant of which are the following:
Non-standard cases. Every job is unique: some failures can be fixed within minutes, whereas others require many hours of work by highly skilled experts with powerful hard drive recovery tools.
Remote assessments are mostly useless when it comes to hard drives: the number of possible reasons behind a simple failure may be too great to allow any preliminary guarantees.
Spare parts: although all specialized services usually have enough replacement parts for standard cases, sometimes it happens that new or rare models require special equipment. Hence, a simple recovery job may require a new HDD for donor parts — hardly a promising scenario in terms of reduction in expenses!
Special equipment: this category includes reliable servers for the storage of recovered files, unique versatile software to recover data from hard drive, and specialized hardware for computer scientists.
As we can see, a flat-rate cost assessment simply does not work when it comes to data recovery. There are too many potential points of failure, too many different tools, and too many ways to solve the problem with various risks. As for the fixed rate depending on the number of bytes restored during the data recovery, this approach is also useless. Recovering 130 gigabytes of videos and 13 gigabytes of documents takes the same amount of work. Judging the accomplished work by the number of restored files would make no sense.
Different Prices for Different Failures
Although we cannot predict the exact price of the HDD restoration, we may look at the most probable scenarios, such as the following:
Accidentally erased data — one of the most common scenarios when it comes to data restoration. This error is surprisingly simple. In many cases, you can fix it on your own with hard drive data recovery tools. Hence, it would cost you $100-$500 depending on the price of the selected tool. For instance, let us consider Disk Drill, which is currently the best solution in the market. Its basic version is free, you can also get a Pro version for less than $90 and an Enterprise version for less than $500.
Logical failure — this is a more complicated scenario. Such a failure may happen because of malware, partition corruption, or similar reasons. If such is the case, restoration of files would cost you more: $300-$1000.
Mechanical failure — here is the most unfortunate scenario, which you simply cannot fix even with the best DIY tools. In some cases, the sustained damage may be too extensive, making successful data restoration virtually impossible. Even when such a restoration is indeed possible, it usually requires donor parts and advanced equipment. Dealing with it may be very expensive: a typical cost may reach as high as a couple of thousand dollars.