gonenutsbrb

Personally, I would get a $4 million deposit with no guarantee of recovery, then spend 10 years browsing Reddit before shrugging my shoulders and telling the client I couldn't find anything.

This is the right answer, because you're not getting anything off the drive that's been wiped properly with one pass ;-)

This is probably not going to get answered as it's not a very popular thing to discuss was surprisingly answered very well. Realistically, they are attempting it already by the time you are called/emailed to say that recovery is possible. It may not be done yet, but the process is under way if not in queue. That being said, this does not mean the process has become negotiable beyond what the company usually states pricing to be. This is our job, and the price was usually determined before you ever called, please don't make our job more complicated by attempting emotional appeals.

The first rule of our job with recoveries (at least for me) is don't get emotionally attached to a job, it leads to poor decision making and bad judgement calls. This is a very technical job and requires quite a bit of capital to start. Equipment is expensive, and much of the software is done on a yearly license basis. Unless someone tries to say that it's $10,000 for a single drive recovery of your summer pictures, they're not trying to rip you off, it's just the cost of doing business. As stated in another post, the average cost should be somewhere around $800-$1200 for a single drive recovery; encryption makes things slightly more difficult to verify a recovery, and RAID arrays are far more complex.

Depends on the drive. Power on/off cycles on any drive cause wear, as does the drive running even if idle. That being said, enterprise class drives were meant to be run 24/7 and have incredibly high MTBF and low URE rates, so keeping them on is probably a safer bet then dealing with constantly shutting them off.

Consumer drives, not so much. It's pretty much a crapshoot either way. Also, if you want your drives to last a while, don't buy "green" or "eco" drives. They're cheap, their performance often sucks, and you are better off spending the extra $20 on a better drive.

You'll have to speak up, we had some budget cuts to my department and had to install cheaper listening devices...

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