Thrown a Bone

I made contact with http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/ and talked to Marc. When my hard drive is delivered from Gillware Data Recovery on Monday, 5/23, I am going to put it in the mail and send it to Drive Savers in Novato, CA. Marc said that he was going to take Gillware's assessment with a grain of salt. Maybe there is hope for the data to be recovered. I'm not ruling out the prospect of re-converting my 4000+ CDs as a possible task in my future. At bare minimum, my 36 spindles, each with at least 100 CDs (some are overstacked) puts me at 3600 CDs. I then have CDs in my other CD shelves and CDs within a couple of other cases. I have a tab in an Excel file where I will track the progress of the re-re-re-conversion (if it comes to that). I will also create a new label for that effort on this blog.

The End of the Start

I got the dreaded email yesterday from Gillware Data Recovery in Madison, WI. This is what they wrote back:

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Please review the attached statement of work and associated firm price quote as it pertains to your open recovery order. We kindly request your acceptance of the quote at your earliest convenience by calling our customer service department with a credit card number confirming your approval.

As you review the statement of work, you will notice that our engineering team as indicated that there is a 0% chance of recovering a vast majority of your data contained on your drive. This fact is because several surfaces of the internal platters are heavily damaged and therefore cannot have any binary data recovered from them. Early estimations are that we will be able to recover about 30% of the data still remaining and we could consider this percentage a successful recovery.

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Attached to the email was a PDF with these details:

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III. Duration of Work
Data recovery work is anticipated to take 8-12 days after your approval to move forward with the attempt. After the preliminary evaluation of your drive, we have an estimated 0% chance of a successful recovery. A successful recovery implies that at least 90% of the customer's files are recovered.
IV. Assumptions
- All provided information regarding the drive that has an impact on recoverability is accurate.
- There are no significant barriers to recovery discovered during the recovery attempt.
V. Compensation
The final cost of this recovery service will be $2500.00, if and only if we successfully recover the critical data in the requested format. This amount does not include the cost of the return media or return shipping. Return media can be provided by the customer or purchased from Gillware at the time of checkout. Keep in mind that if approval is given for this attempt and we are unable to recover your critical files, you are still under no financial obligation for any of the work rendered during the recovery attempt.

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Really? $2500 when "we have an estimated 0% chance of a successful recovery."