Having had four or five hard drive failures in the past couple of years, I've done some poking about with whether "recovery" is feasible and/or cost-effective. Generally, it's not either, if you have a "real failure."

My sole conclusion is that it's best to have good enough back up to make it unnecessary. Only one of my hard drive failures actually lost any significant data, once I got sort of a system going.

That was when the backup drive failed while I was waiting for delivery of the replacement for the internal drive that it backed up.

Believe me, it can happen to you!!! - - or to anybody.

(I've lost more useful data from CDs that tested good at burn time but were "unreadable" at recovery time. Hard drives are the best backup - IMO, if only for the amount of space it takes to store all the CDs and the difficulty of finding which one has the data.)

John