Data Recovery Is Fucking Expensive

My main altar. I try to keep it simple.

Well, I have called around and gotten data recovery estimates for my hard drive . . . the least expensive? Between $600-$2100. They promise not to charge any higher than their written estimate.

I checked through my emails and found that I had purchased that hard drive on November 3rd of 2003. So, when I emailed them about the problem the hard drive was technically 10 days out of warranty. I send them a fairly assertive email saying essentially what will you do to help me in this situation? That's where the rubber will meet the road in terms of customer service. The company I work for would probably honor the warranty. But replacing the drive won't replace the data.

Very frustrating.

I have been trying to figure out exactly what I lost that needs replacing. The good news is that my iTunes folder is on this drive. iPhoto is really what I lost, some of my older writing, some older games and assorted smut. That's not as bad as I was afraid initially. The important things to replace are the iPhoto library and my writing. I never played those games so they are not overly important to me. The porn? Well, it will be difficult to replace. If there is one thing the internet is short of it is pornographic images. You just can't find them anywhere on the net.

So the plan is to purchase a new hard drive from a reliable, name brand company, get warranty fulfillment on the old hard drive in the form of a new one. At that point I will truly have space to back up all of my data. Then I will bite the bullet and see about recovery of data. I don't remember the directory structure, so I am just going to tell them to recover Word documents first (my writing) and then iPhoto documents followed by graphics (web sites I am working on) and then whatever else they can get.

Learn from my lesson folks. New 160GB hard drive: $209. Data recovery: $600-2100. Back up everything. Then burn it to a CD or DVD.

Rebecca, I don't know anything about computers either. That's why I use Macs!