I would like to make some comments, not to defend or attack anyone here, but to give my opinion!
Zero Alpha wrote:
So obviously there remote DR computer system (not sure what they call it) Is really just a remote administered PC3000?
I don't see how remote data recovery can be achieved if there's any kind of physical problem on a hard drive. When the problem lies on the logical structures then remote recoveries are perfectly possible.
hddguy wrote:
A DR professional working alone or for a small company will after time have gained more expertise then most DR professionals that work for a big name and just work in a single department. I believe that at one of the big companies the cleanroom engineer does not work on Raid assembly and The File System guy does not align heads. Of course they have all the greatest and newest tools, but without them their recovery rate my fall drastically.
What you are saying may actually be true, although you are assuming that there's no cross training in a company and that an employee may stay in the same department. This doesn't take away the fact that the bigger company probably has more resources to do recoveries than the small one: A highly specialized team of "data reconstruction" engineers(quoting BlackST from different thread) working closely with a team of engineers working in the clean room, using proprietary tools supported by a R&D team makes a pretty good mix I think.
pepe wrote:
Sometimes smaller companies work better than the big ones.
Big ones have limited time to work on one drive. If they cannot show up some result in a couple of hours, they might say the drive is beyond recovery.
I had a case recently when the customer was told by Kurt that his drive is unrecoverable.
It took me some 10 hours to build a working SA and recover the data. They didn't have that many time probably.

Or it wasn't that challenging for them, who knows...
pepe
I don't think this is true. I would tend to think than rather than giving up on a drive, the big company would let the customer know that the recovery will require a lot more work than expected and would warn that the recovery will be more expensive and let them decide whether to carry on or not. Although I have never heard of Kurt, it's possible that the customer was told just that and he decided to have the data recovered by a cheaper dr company.
I also think that big companies and small companies target slightly different consumers. Big companies have contracts with large OEMs and vendors. They normally work on high profile recovery cases like big SAN systems and 40/60/80+ hdds RAID recoveries where critical data needs to be recovered within 24 hours or just a few days.
Smaller companies target the end user or small business areas. But I think that due to the economical situations, big companies have started targeting these areas too. They can't give prices as low as small companies though due to the amount of investment and needs for return (big companies spend a LOT of money on investments and resources: Marketing teams, Business expansion teams, Sales teams, human resources department, technicians (clean room and logical engineers), R&D teams, administration/management, accounting team, etc) and even though they carry out about 40K+ recoveries a year they their expenditures are equally big. A small company can start making profit with a small number of jobs priced < £400 even if they spent weeks doing the recovery.
Regards.