Companies offering data recovery services have been prospering for almost 20 years. These companies sprang to life in the late 1980s in response to the unreliability of 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 inch floppy disks. Of course those days are long obsolete. Through the 1990s the process of data recovery services shifted to an emphasis on recovery of files from physically damaged and broken computer hard drives. In those years it was very common for a computer hard drive to suffer a physical crash due to a motor burning out or an overheated control board. Today’s super large sized hard disk drives ranging in size from 100 GB to one full terabyte are far more reliable. In fact they seldom physically break ever.
This poses the question, what are these data recovery services companies charging us for? Most charge between 500 and 2000 dollars to retrieve all of the files stored on a crashed hard drive. But if the hard drive is not actually damaged, what are they charging so much money for? These companies now charge ridiculously high prices to simply connect your failed hard drive up to what is referred to as a technician computer and use that computer to open your drive. They then copy out your files and return your hard drive to you. You pay these companies hundreds of dollars an hour to perform a simple software operation you could easily do at home.