Today’s storage environments, including RAID arrays, VMware, virtual servers and solid state drives (SSDs) are complex, and data recovery often requires more than a do-it-yourself solution.

When people call us here at 24 Hour Data, they often have concerns that our data recovery services will be expensive. It’s true that data recovery — depending on the storage media — sometimes costs more than the cost of the storage device (especially if you are talking about a smaller capacity hard disk drive or even a USB drive or flash memory card.)

But when you are recovering lost data, it is not the cost of the storage media that is of concern — it’s the overall value of the data. 

Worth More Than the Paper It’s Printed On?

To use an old-fashioned, analog example, the post office will not permit businesses or individuals to insure printed material beyond the cost of the material itself.

In other words, if a bestselling author were to mail his completed manuscript to a publisher (before we kept back-ups on computers or even word processors) the author could not insure the work for its true value as a potential bestseller, only the cost of the paper it was printed on. (That’s why smart authors kept duplicate copies of their submitted work.)

Evaluating Data Recovery Prices

If you were to evaluate data recovery pricing based on the cost of the storage media, you’d be making a similar mistake. USB drives sell for less than $10 each. You can pick up a hard disk drive for well under $100. But what is the value of the content (whether it’s text, audio or video) on that storage media? This is what you have to evaluate when you decide if data recovery is worth the cost.

Obviously, if you don’t have back-ups in place — or your back-ups are inaccessible — a successful data recovery becomes much more critical, and much more valuable to you as a business or an individual.

Is data recovery expensive? At 24 Hour Data, we keep our prices affordable to be able to provide services to a wide range of businesses and individuals. But if you still believe data recovery is expensive, compare it to the cost (either real or emotional) of losing your data forever.