New remote data recovery support pricing

[lcoughey]

I need your help coming up with a fair pricing model for this new service. Although there might be exceptions to the rule, the service would be intended to be support for computer technicians and other data recovery labs. It would be up to the tech to mark up the price for their clients, as they so choose.

The way the service works is that "you" would connect the drive(s) in question with a destination drive directly to a healthy system with High Speed Internet access and boot off our custom built boot CD (burned from a downloadable ISO). Our team gets notified when the disk is booted with the necessary information to connect to the system.

From there, we can do the following:

1. Make clones or images of failing drives
2. Remotely recover from damaged file systems
3. Recover from broken RAID arrays

I want the pricing to be competitive. So, for various things to price, what do you think? As Canadian/US Dollars are almost on par, it is assumed that is what we are referring to. I've put some prices in below to start:

Base fee: $50

Drive clone: $100/drive: (assuming it is possible)

Single drive logical recovery (working on a clone drive):
< 500GB drive - $150
500GB - 1TB drive - $200
1.5TB - 2TB drive - $300
> 2TB drive - $500

RAID support: (working with clones)
- single drive logical recovery price * number of drives in the array

If the physical lab services are needed, the projects would be quoted on a case by case basis.

 

[lcoughey]

Really? Nothing? I was expecting some trash talk, at the very least.

 

[CTNorthShore]

So, instead of owning operating our own data recovery equipment, we would be able to just hook up a drive, not from your disk and let you do all the work? Sounds intriguing.

Could I assume the no data, no charge policy is in effect... or are the flat fees charged for the effort? Would the data be written to an external drive on our side? I think the prices are reasonable considering all we have to do is mark up the service and do a little legwork.

 

[lcoughey]

So, instead of owning operating our own data recovery equipment, we would be able to just hook up a drive, not from your disk and let you do all the work? Sounds intriguing.

Could I assume the no data, no charge policy is in effect... or are the flat fees charged for the effort? Would the data be written to an external drive on our side? I think the prices are reasonable considering all we have to do is mark up the service and do a little legwork.

My proposal for this service is a $50 base fee to cover some of the cost of our time to assess and give it a try.

On top of that would be the pricing mentioned above. So, if you wanted us to take it from the top and clone, then recover from a 250GB hard drive, the price would be:

$50 + $100 (clone) + $150 (recovery) = $300

As there are steps to the process, the no data, no charge would depend on where we are in the process. The base fee of $50 will always be charged.

If we are asked to clone the drive, but are unable to get the drive to clone at all, we would stop, say it needs to come to the lab and you only pay the base fee.

If we are asked to recover the data and we are unable to do so, you would only pay the base fee...and the cost of the clone, if that was done already.

Make any sense?

 

[Larry Sabo]

Since you are offering just logical recovery, why would a tech use this service instead of GetDataBack or R-Studio? Add to that the glacial speed of uploading the image/data over an internet connection, and it's a no-brainer to me. Maybe I just don't understand the offer.

 

[lcoughey]

Since you are offering just logical recovery, why would a tech use this service instead of GetDataBack or R-Studio? Add to that the glacial speed of uploading the image/data over an internet connection, and it's a no-brainer to me. Maybe I just don't understand the offer.

First off, nothing is being uploaded over the internet. The recovery is being done remotely.

Yes, you could run GetDataBack and R-Studio. As originally mentioned at the first, this is a support service for technicians. What happens when you cannot figure it out?

 

[300DDR]

Interesting idea, but I'd think your prices need to be at least 1/2 of what you are offering to get many takers. There is a guy that does the exact same thing with a Linux ISO but for free (he works for donations). *Minus perhaps the RAID recoveries and I can't speak to his experience.

 

[codegreen]

Since you're offering software cloning and logical recovery, this isn't a service I would use as I do these things myself. However...

If we are asked to recover the data and we are unable to do so, you would only pay the base fee...and the cost of the clone, if that was done already.

Basically, you want to charge $150 for no data recovered? I would run, not walk, from such an arrangement. There's no way a technician could pass that cost on to a customer and have nothing to show for it. You'd have to settle for you base assessment price for this to make any sense.

Besides that, I think your prices are too high. I don't see how anyone could mark up these services and make a profit. I'm not trying to talk trash or show favourtism, but it makes better business sense to use 300DDR, who offers a wider variety of solutions for about the same price (albeit it slower, since the drive has to be sent in).

There is a guy that does the exact same thing with a Linux ISO but for free (he works for donations). *Minus perhaps the RAID recoveries and I can't speak to his experience.

For free? I wouldn't touch that with a ten-foot pole. I don't want to stake my business's reputation on someone who doesn't feel his time and expertise is worth anything, just like I wouldn't take my car to some guy on Craiglist offering free repairs.

 

[lcoughey]

I can see the argument of paying $150 and not getting data back is hard to pass to client. However, the $150 was not to recover data, but to assist someone in getting a clone of a drive so that they could try their thing first.

On that point, perhaps there is a minimum fee $50 for the convenience and we charge $50/drive to clone.

So, if you are a tech who wants to try to force the RAID to rebuild, but want assistance in making sure you have the drives cloned before you risk losing it all, you would pay us $50 x # of drives for the clones. If we find that there are bigger issues or drive damage, we will let you know and then we can decide on whether we move to the next step of RAID recovery, you try things yourself or you forward the drive to a lab.

The main intent for this is for RAID support, with the idea that the tech already has the tools and capability to properly clone the drives but just cannot figure out how to recover the data from the array.

I'm not a math wizzard, but let's take a look.

4 x 173GB SCSI RAID 5 would be $1200 (4 x $300) plus shipping with 300DollarDataRecovery plus the time to ship the drives to and from his location.

For a $50 committment from you, we would provide immediate service (during our business hours, of course) for $600 (4 x $150) with no time lost to shipping. The $50 is likely to be about what you would have paid for shipping, anyway.

I'm not out to steal work from Brian...he is very good at what he does.

Now, to the point of this thread, I am not looking at being beat up, though I expected it...and may even deserve it. But, the intent of the thread was to get suggestions as to what kind of pricing model would work for you. The pricing I listed was just a starting point from which we could dialogue.

 

[300DDR]

For the most difficult RAIDs we can't solve, we use two off-site guys (one in UK, one in Russia). They charge about the same amount, but the time zones are sometimes difficult to work with. We'll keep you in mind as a third option as that is a fair price for rebuilding a tough RAID.

--

Luke, do you know Alyn (aj2007 I think, on some forums) or Dr. Kiev (from hddguru forum)? Do you think your RAID experience/knowledge is equal or better than theirs?

 

[lcoughey]

For the most difficult RAIDs we can't solve, we use two off-site guys (one in UK, one in Russia). They charge about the same amount, but the time zones are sometimes difficult to work with. We'll keep you in mind as a third option as that is a fair price for rebuilding a tough RAID.

--

Luke, do you know Alyn (aj2007 I think, on some forums) or Dr. Kiev (from hddguru forum)? Do you think your RAID experience/knowledge is equal or better than theirs?

I don't know Alyn, but I am aware of Dr. Kiev. I'd say that my team is able to do as much, if not more than him. We'd be happy to help.

 

[lcoughey]

For now, I think that we'll just make our remote pricing the same as our lab pricing with a partner discount...perhaps with an up front free for the special priority services.

At the end of the day, we'll likely be quoting on a case by case scenario with the technician we are working with.

 

[othersteve]

Both of you guys (Brian and Luke) have been helpful to me in the past, so I will absolutely keep your new service in mind, Luke, should I run across any such situations in the future!

I can't speak to the pricing really. Thus far I have been fortunately lucky in my RAID recoveries personally. The last really sticky situation I was in, I had imaged three RAID-5 drives from a dentist's office (using DDI of course) and had to find a way to reconstruct the parameters to perform a successful logical data recovery. I ended up using Runtime's RAID Reconstructor for the task, and found it quite simple in that case. I know that it isn't always this easy however.

For comparisons, Runtime also offers a professional RAID parameters analysis service. Their pricing is a flat $299... here's more info on that:

http://www.runtime.org/raidprobe.htm