Data Recovery Case File · Trust, Practice & Practicalities · Three Drives, Three Answers

One definite, two maybes, zero pressure: per-drive assessment as decision support — and the honest answers to evaluation fees, turnaround, and the price of "no"

His enquiry read like well-run procurement, and it deserves publishing as a template. The estate: three drives — a "WD Elements Portable 5TB — I will definitely need data recovered from this one"; and two veteran 500GB laptop drives, one HGST, one WD, about which he was refreshingly plain: "I am uncertain if I want to proceed until I know the potential costs. Please provide a separate price for each drive so I can make an informed decision." Then the checklist that closes half the trust pages in this archive, asked here in one breath: "any evaluation/diagnostic fees (and whether they are applied toward recovery if I proceed); the typical turnaround time; what happens if the data cannot be recovered." No symptoms were offered for any of the three — which is itself part of the decode, because it frames the honest limit of what any firm can say before drives arrive. Every question gets its direct answer below, and the case's quiet centrepiece is the thing that happened at the end: one of his maybes became a no, and the no cost him nothing. That is the structure working.

The answers, and the structures behind them

Separate prices — the only honest architecture: yes, and not as a favour: per-drive quoting is the only structure that keeps accountability attached to units. Each drive gets its own free assessment, its own fault class, its own fixed written figure including VAT, its own no-recovery-no-fee — so a "yes" on one never subsidises or coerces a "yes" on another, and his informed decision stays informed drive by drive. Bundled multi-drive pricing blurs exactly the line his enquiry was drawn to protect.

Evaluation fees, "and whether they are applied toward recovery": his parenthesis shows he'd met the industry's other model — the diagnostic fee credited if you proceed — and it deserves naming for what it is: a sunk cost engineered to lean on the decision. Money already spent whispers proceed. The answer here dissolves the question: assessment is free, for all three drives, including any he declines — so there is nothing to apply, nothing sunk, and nothing whispering. A maybe assessed under a free model is still a genuine maybe afterwards; that is the entire point of the model.

Turnaround, and "what happens if the data cannot be recovered": the timescale goes in writing beside each figure, per drive; and if a recovery fails, the answer is the policy this archive has spelled out from its first volume — 50% of parts and labour upfront with the balance only on success, per unit, independently, with success defined in the quote so the promise is testable. And the honest note his symptomless list earns: no figure exists before assessment, for anyone, because price follows fault class and fault class follows examination — a firm quoting three sight-unseen numbers would be quoting fiction three times.

The assessments: three verdicts, one decline honoured

The 5TB Elements — his definite — assessed to a mechanical head fault, was quoted, approved, serviced under the laminar flow bench and imaged; its estate delivered verified. The two veterans were assessed individually and quoted individually, exactly as requested: one carried recoverable material he judged worth its figure, and proceeded; the other's assessment and price met his private valuation and lost — he declined, the drive went back to him untouched, and the decline cost nothing. No re-quote, no "while it's here," no friction. Decision support delivered as decisions, both directions.

On the bench

Three drives, one machine, one session: the Atola TaskForce 2 exists for exactly this, its ports running the trio in parallel — each drive diagnosed, imaged and hashed independently, none queuing behind another's problems. The per-drive quoting this page defended is the commercial face of that parallelism: three separate technical verdicts produced side by side, three separate figures, and the freedom to say yes to two and no to one without the no costing anything. The credited-diagnostic sunk-cost trick documented above has no purchase on a bench whose assessments are genuinely free — and genuinely simultaneous.

The outcome

Two recoveries delivered verified on new media; one informed "no" processed with the same courtesy as the yeses; three written quotes he could file, compare, and hold anyone to. The closing line of his report generalised the case for every multi-drive household: a firm's real pricing model shows in what a "no" costs. Here it costs nothing — which is the only answer that keeps a maybe honest.

Our case files are drawn from genuine enquiries received by our laboratory over the past ten years, anonymised to protect client confidentiality. Each one describes the diagnostic and recovery procedure our engineers apply to that fault, using the equipment listed.