Toronto, Ontario, Canada. We are constantly reminded by our clients of just how expensive data recovery can be. No matter how much we attempt to prepare clients, many are still outright shocked at the cost. I can sympathize with many of our clients as I’ve experienced the same sensation at least a few times over the last year; like when I brought my car in for a simple brake job and the bill surged to almost a $1000; or when my furnace started making knocking noises and I was quoted over $1200 for a new blower motor. So what makes data recovery so expensive ….. or is it?

Just as your local auto service would not charge you the same price for an oil change as they would for a new exhaust system, Data Recovery pricing varies greatly. Some recoveries may take 20 minutes to resolve, while others can be on-going for a week or longer. Some problems can be handled by a junior data recovery technician, while others may require our resident genius to step in. Data loss may be the result of the accidental deletion of a few files, the dropping of a laptop or the failure of multiple hard drives from a 12 drive RAID array. Obviously the skill set and resources required to bring a crashed hard drive back to life or to reconstruct a damaged RAID array are much greater than the expertise required recovering a few deleted files.

Data Recovery is a service business with no guarantees. Sometime the data is just not recoverable no matter how much effort and parts we throw at it. And of course nobody likes to pay you for NOT recovering their data. So most reputable data recovery companies have adopted a somewhat unique service guarantee, where if we cannot recover the data you need, you will not be charged a dime. Consequently when data recovery jobs are quoted, the odds of us being able to recover the data successfully are built into the equation. In other words if we estimate the odds of a successful recovery are only 10%, then the recovery case will be quoted quite high. Looking at it slightly differently, if we attempt 10 such cases, we will be successful and get paid for just one of them. On the other hand, if our experience determines a recovery case is recoverable in 99% of the time, than the cost may be quite reasonable as there will be no risk factor built in.

What is you data worth? The most expensive data recovery I’ve been involved in was from a large world class hospital in one of the southern U.S. states. The hospital had been downloading all of its medical images, from ultrasounds to MRIs, to one server that was supposedly being backed up every night. When the server’s RAID array crashed one rainy night, they quickly learned their backup tapes were useless. The cost to re-book and recreate the over 200,000 images would have been in the millions of dollars, and many of them could never be replicated as the patients condition had changed. The job took us 3 months with a team of 4 techs and we ended up charging somewhere just over a $100K. And imagine this: we actually LOST money on it!

Providing a thorough and world class recovery service demands an investment in high end people and expensive equipment. Yes we could do data recovery cheaper like many on the web that scoop off the easiest cases and declare the rest unrecoverable (a real crime and disservice to everyone). Or we could charge ridiculous pricing like the big boys of the industry. But, doing just the easy cases so we are super profitable, or quoting everything super high so that when we do get an approval we make big money, is NOT our philosophy. We want to provide every client with the best chance of getting their data back and at a reasonable cost. Reasonable must mean we are able to be profitable enough to stay in the business and profitable enough to continue to invest in our people, our equipment and our processes. We have consciously set our pricing to be somewhere between these two extremes. http://www.memofixdatarecovery.com/data-recovery-pricing.php

So, if you find yourself in need of a data recovery service, please take the time to consider the value of your data. If it’s not worth much, go ahead and take a chance on a cheap fly by night recovery service or call you geeky brother-in-law Stan. But if you or your company can’t live without your data, don’t waste the first and best chance of a successful recovery with anyone but a professional recovery service like Memofix. … David Foster