been there, done that, cost me £1200 to get the data recovered from some place called geeknerds in london

and even then they only recovered about 60% of the data

on the plus side, he did say that if the data was recovered and i didn't want to keep it i could leave it, but my mrs is still screwing at not having certain pics of the kids and files about stuff no longer available so backing up everything is a must

they also offered a few different pay scales depending on how difficult it was to recover the data, hermetically sealed rooms and if they could find a hard drive from the same manufacturer range for age and size were also a factor so i had to pay full top whack for it

but i did get another hard drive with all the data on it to plug in, but even then there were still some corrupt files on there so i spent the next 2 or 3 weeks going through them all deleting those files which were no longer viewable