Isn't it nice to know your data mistakes aren't the ones clipped to the bulletin board at support organizations? Do you really want to be famous because you're a scientist yet drilled a hole in a hard disk casing and poured oil in so the drive would stop squeaking? Read about this "genius" and others in this collection of data disaster horror stories.
What the article doesn't tell you, because it's not that kind of article, is the cost of recovering those files off those innovatingly-trashed drives. When I researched stories on hard disk recovery services a couple of years ago, the prices fell into two ranges: around $50, and $1000 and up.
If your drive just dies for some reason inside your computer, a technical support person with specialized software may be able to spin it up long enough to get the data off. Techs also have devices that read drives outside a computer. If these easy tricks work, you pay for an hour of time and probably the cost of a new replacement drive. No sweat, and you dodged a huge bullet.
When the data recovery services start pulling drives apart to try and read any surviving bits from the platters, you're talking some serious moolah. The $1000 amount I mentioned earlier is the price of a ticket to get started. Recovering any data will cost much much more, and there are no guarantees all of your data will be recovered.
Drive recovery services also support consumers. The owner of one explained that a drive holding the only digital photos of a first grandchild will be worth nearly any amount of money to those grandparents. Sadly, about thirty percent of that service's consumers were repeat
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