Although we are not specialists in data recovery, from time to time we are presented with corrupted hard drives and memory cards.
Using drive repair and data recovery software tools we have managed to successfully restore thousands of photographs, work documents, e-mails and (most recently) 70+ family videos.
Celerity Design does not have a dedicated lab or workshop for data recovery, and if your media is physically corrupted there is little we can do. Having said that, many types of data corruption are recoverable and we are happy to try and help in the event of your data loss. Our rates are very reasonable, and we won't charge you anything for assessing the damage. If we can recover your files, you will only be charged by the hour (not by the number of files) and the cost of the media to return your data on.
Recommended Backup Strategy for Home Users (UPDATED article)
Our best advice for home users on a budget is to back up your data to DVDs every week or month depending on your need. We'd actually advise doing *full* backups, so that even if one disc should fail in the future, you will still have plenty of backups. DVDs are cheap enough nowadays to make this a viable solution. For photographs, we strongly recommend using the free Google Picasa software, which makes backing up photos to DVD extremely simple. If you have enough data that too many DVDs would be required to make this practical, an external drive should be used. This drive should be checked periodically for errors to ensure it is working well. Since this page was first written, the cost of external drives has come down considerably as well, making it a more cost-effective solution.
If you have a reasonably quick broadband connection, off-site backups are now also feasible option for home users. Services we have experience with are Moxy and Jungle Disk. Bear in mind that offsite backups can take considerable time to recover from - for example weeks rather than days, so at the time of writing (August 2008) our advice is that they should be used more for peace of mind, and used in conjunction with a local backup.