I get asked sometimes how do I sleep at night after issuing a $1000 average quote for a data recovery service. Well the answer is quote straightforward! It's a business like any other. We don't intend to hold the customers data hostage, we don't have a special machine that we plug hard drives into that does all the work for us and there are a lot of costs for us, time knowledge, experience, research and reverse engineering to actually get the data back.

Basic data recovery equipment: A class 100 cleanroom, a technological software/hardware complex that can interface with the hard drive firmware on a factory level, tools, gloves, masks and two steady hands. All of this will costs a minimum of 10.000$ not counting reading a book worth of reverse engineering and firmware modifications for every hard drive brand that is out there, opening up at least 300 hard drives before even attempting data recovery on a customers hard drive which may store all their life.

Furthermore, depending on how much data needs to be recovered, a Hard drive may stay plugged into the machine recovering the data for up to two weeks. Extracting data from a damaged hard drive can go below 1MB per second and with a TB of data that needs to be recovered ... you do the math.

And that is why at the end of the day a $1000 price tag is actually reasonable and not all of it is profit for us. We still need to pay rent, electricity, coffee and snicker bars.