AFAIK they charge an initial fee plus pro rata per megabyte recovered, so video will rack up the cost. You pay an up-front inspection fee, they tell you what there is that can be recovered, and then you decide what of that you are willing to pay for. The charges are understandable considering the environment, equipment, and expertise involved, and if it were any cheaper I would worry whether it was some amateur working in his garage (like I might... or those on YouTube) with a greater risk of losing everything rather than recovering something.
I have recovered data from a failed drive, but the failure was the motor drive electronics and therefore I didn't have to "open the box". Clicking noises are in the mechanics, which are sealed inside.
all my carefully curated clips of TV
It's not my intention to rub salt into the wound, but I really must stress that any digital data which is considered valuable HAS TO BE duplicated in at least three places. I guess you've learned that lesson now but anyone else take note. Having thought this issue over in the past, I've decided that backing up telly isn't worth it and if my recordings die
c'est la vie (but others might take a different view). Coming to terms with that ahead of time takes the sting out of it. My PC data is a different matter.
I've never yet known a real physical notebook or photo album to crash (but they can still burn!), but those are "so last century"!
All electronic forms of storage are at risk, even some factory-pressed DVDs are now useless because of disc rot. Standard CD-R/DVD-R can't be relied on beyond about a decade and need multiple copies plus a programme of regular re-duplication, and there are no guarantees the format will be supported in years to come. Flash (eg USB sticks) doesn't promise infinite data retention. It's all these issues which make on-line rented managed storage so popular – they use RAID farms (and consume a lot of electricity). I've invested my faith into M-Discs.
All forms of digital data storage can (and do) fail, frequently without warning. Complacency is not an option. A storage device / medium which has a track history of reliability lulls the user into a false sense of security, which has to be resisted. Whether anything can be recovered from failed storage depends on (a) how simple it is to physically extract the data, and (b) how simply the data is encoded and structured (eg: does the loss of one data block only corrupt that block of data, or does it make the entire data set impossible to interpret?).
I have two suggestions:
- Bite the bullet and pay up; or...
- Keep the drive safely with a note of what's on it, then when you or anyone else considers it worth the cost you/they can do it in the future.
