I had a hard drive failure a couple of weeks ago. Dell replaced my hard drive no charge. Boot sector failure. The Local Dell tech told me that in my case often times the drive can be hooked up as a slave drive and files saved.

He told me the chains charge big money as people are willing to pay for the service and don't know where to look for help.

He suggested I look in the yellow pages for computer repair and start calling.

I did and found a local guy who would do it for $75.

Took my HD in and he saved everything I asked for.

While he was doing that, he told me that data can be recovered from most failures using slaving and simple recovery utilities. It only becomes expensive when the hard drive mechanically won't function or is damaged but even then as long as the disk is intact the data can usually recover.

I didn't have him recover every thing. The only thing I didn't get was email addrsses and only because we didn't know where to look.

While in the shop I bought a desktop hard drive-1 terabyte. I backed up all 4 computers in the house to this hard drive and still have 855 gigabytes of storage space.

I also combined all the old document files and picture from the 4 computers in one master file for each subject.

I can access these files from any computer in the house. But the best part is this hard drive is only connected to power or a computer when backing up or aceessing a file. The rest of the time it just sits on the shelf.