Over the years I've experienced many catastrophic hard drive failures. Sometimes I've been able to recover part of the data by moving the drive to a different computer, or sometimes by accessing it in some different way (e.g., booting from a CD, installing a different OS, or installing the same OS on a new partition, etc.). As hard drives have gotten bigger, however, I've had less success with these techniques, and the consequences of each failure have gotten more severe.\r
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This last time was just the worst. A 500GB Western Digital MyBook failed suddenly and completely, taking with it a full year's worth of hard work. Nothing I tried would get the data back, and starting over was unacceptable. Stentorian was able to recover all of it quickly at a great price, and then gave me some very good advice on how to prevent something like this from happening again. I'm very, very pleased.
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