Data recovery can be tricky. If you have a hard drive that is failing, I can copy its entire contents to a new hard drive. The trick is to get it to me in time. Once the drive dies, data recovery is much more expensive.

Drive errors, failure to start Windows? In most cases all the contents of your drive can be recovered. Bad sectors can produce holes in your files, usually in files that belong to Windows itself. This can be fixed with a "Windows Repair", which takes a fresh copy of all the files for Windows from an original installation CD. Your computer can be up and running as if nothing ever happened.

Once the drive dies, it's more serious. If the problem is the circuit board on the drive itself, known as the I/O board, sometimes replacing this will get the drive working just long enough to copy the data off. This requires sacrificing a new drive to get a working I/O board, and you need another working drive to receive the data. That means purchasing 2 new drives, as well as labour. My labour charge for this work is the same as everything else: $30/hour, but will take a few hours.

If the problem is with internal drive mechanics, repairing the drive requires a clean room. A hard drive rotates so fast and the read head is so close to the surface that a single speck of dust would scratch the surface, destroying your data. I can send a drive to a specialty service for that kind of data recovery, but they change $3,000 to $5,000 for the work. Again, if a drive is failing get it to me quickly while data recovery is still affordable.

Recovering data from a damaged database requires software. A database isn't a hardware problem, it requires software. For example, I had one customer bring a damaged accounting database from Simply Accounting. I had to examine the data to figure out the format, then write a custom program to extract the data. I was able to recover all data for the General Ledger.