Conclusion: High Price, Valuable Service
The cost of a recovery procedure falls between $600 and $4,000 - depending on the delay and the extent of work involved. In our case, CBL managed to recover all of the data deemed important - much to the great relief of our editor, of course, who thought his personal data might be lost and gone forever.
CBL offers its customers a guarantee that no costs will become payable until it has been able to reconstruct the desired data. This statement speaks highly for the data rescuer, as well for the apparently good chances of recovering most content under usual hard drive defect scenarios. In our case, it was even possible to continue using the hard disk - even though we wouldn't recommend that.
Looking Ahead: Saving RAID Arrays
Data recovery is even possible with RAID arrays consisting of numerous hard disks. Of course, this entails a lot more work; therefore, you should expect a minimum cost of more than $5,000 (4,000 euros).
Saving data on an array drive follows the same procedure as described above. After that, the data is read with special software; CBL doesn't need a RAID controller to do that. The software is able to recognize and read array structures and then write the data, piece by piece, on a special volume.
