I had a hard disk die recently, and yes, after preaching to the masses the maxim: “If you can’t afford to lose it, back it up!,” I had months worth of at-risk data.
Looking at going to a data recovery center is not an inexpensive proposition. So I’m intrigued by this piece on Hack-a-Day on how to remove the platters from a dead drive and install them in an identical working drive (bought on the cheap via eBay). It doesn’t look that hard. Don’t know that I’ll do it — the data is too precious to risk — but it is tempting — especially since I’m looking at hundreds of dollars to have somebody else do it.