[ARSCLIST] Suggestions needed re: crashed disk drive recovery

["Richard L. Hess" <arclists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

First of all, sorry for the cross-posting...

I am beside myself. A non-profit heritage site 
that I'm peripherally involved with has had a 
disk crash and they then found out that their 
backup system has not been working for three 
years...although it was religiously taken off-site daily for three years!

I had nothing to do with it, but one person/firm 
basically told them to forget about the 
recovery?that they were likely to get only a few 
percent at best--and if anything was retreived 
they'd owe the full fee of $3000.

I'm hoping to have a meeting with some of the 
people who know something about the system and 
the problem right after Christmas and the key 
piece of information I need to help them is a 
short list of drive recovery vendors, especially in Canada.

I suspect that no one on these lists have had any 
first-hand experience with the need for 
this...you're all too careful about backups, and 
that is fortunate!!! But maybe you helped someone with their laptop, etc.

I can do a Google search, but I'm hoping that 
someone knows someone who has had data recovered 
(or attempted it) from a crashed hard drive and 
can provide an informed perspective about the 
process before we dump kilobucks on it.

If you've had recovery from a crashed RAID set, 
I'd like to hear about that as well, as I don't 
think it's a RAID set, but it could be. The more 
info I have going into this, the better.

It's probably better if you respond directly to 
me at mailto:richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and I can 
write a summary piece to post back--if you'd 
prefer to be confidential, please let me know.

Thanks a lot and Happy Holidays!!!

Cheers,

Richard

Richard L. Hess                   email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Aurora, Ontario, Canada       (905) 713 6733     1-877-TAPE-FIX
Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.