I left work Friday in a very bad mood.  And understandably so.  My historical data for the past 6 years was lost.  I got frustrated every time I thought about it over the weekend.  Certainly, there had to be some way to retrieve my data.  But, I was reminded that they said that it was all lost.  Heck, if the hard drive was actually hosed, maybe they would let me have it to see if I could get something out of it myself.

On Monday morning, I called up my friendly IT rep and tried my best to whine and beg some data out of her.  She either took pity on me or just wanted to get me off the phone (I’m OK with either one), so she said that she would call Dell and see what she could learn and what our options were.  After a few hours she returned my call with a good news / bad news scenario.  The good news is that the error message indicated that the information was still probably on the drive.  The bad news is that the disks weren’t spinning, so there was no way to pull the data off without a costly rebuild.

So, I called around several local companies and learned that data recovery can be achieved…just not locally.  After more calling, I found a couple of companies that are willing to evaluate the hard drive for free and then tell me if the data can be retrieved and if so, how much it will run.  The cost?  Between $350 and  $2,700.  WOW!  That’s a lot of money!  I could buy a whole new computer for that!  Of course, that new computer wouldn’t have my prized data on it, would it?  Nuts.

So, with slight hesitation, we’re sending the drive off to see how much the damage will be.  I’m hoping for the low end because work would pay for it.  If on the high end, I can kiss the data goodbye.  Better yet, maybe the company will take pity on me and do it all for free.  Hey, if I’m already grasping at straws, might as well reach for the golden ones.