So, I had an idea for a business model this afternoon.

In my experience, hard drive recovery services are incredibly expensive (at least $1000+, in all instances I've heard quoted). This is because in order to support the full level of recovery service you need to be able to take a hard drive apart, remove the important internals, and place it in other working hardware. This process requires large amounts of time, skilled personnel, and a clean room (so not to destroy data).

However, it isn't always the mechanical portion of a drive that fails. Sometimes a bit is mis-written, or software errors occur, or simply a mistake is made by the user such that they corrupt or destroy their filesystem, or otherwise render their data inaccessible by normal means. In non-mechanical failure situations, there are a ton of programs out there (and many of them free), that perform basic recovery such that one can extract critical files with decent to good accuracy.

However, that these recovery programs exist only fuels my paranoia. I find that unless people are educated and diligent with their data, it is trivial to recover a person's files after they've deleted them. And being educated and diligent on the subject of encryption, filesystems, and data integrity often takes much more time than people are willing to commit, in the same way people are willing to ignore the necessity for good backups until critical failure occurs.

So my idea is this:

• Forget attempting recoveries on mechanical failures. Offer to tell them if it is a mechanical failure, but tell the customer that the chance of recovery in the event of mechanical failure is very slim.
• Offer to do basic recovery, based on a quick, automated scan of the drive, telling the customer what is possible, given their current situation. Different levels of recovery could be priced differently.
• And as an alternative, offer to do complete wiping of the disk at a relatively cheap cost.

If you didn't have to support mechanical failures, you could probably undercut the competition by half. And offering a reliable, convenient way for people to ensure that people don't get at their data when they're done with it would be something I'd be interested in (plus I like the idea of villifying Geek Squad members in a marketing campaign... "What happens to your data after it leaves your hands?")