Usually if I buy a new drive, it's to rotate out an older one. My "test" is to copy the mostly full drive onto the new one and keep the old drive on the shelf for a couple months in case of problems. Most drives either suffer an early death or last a good number of years. After 2-3 months I'll reuse the old drive for other storage needs.

The main company doing the CGI work (Digital Domain Media Group) went under and was sold off. It was a quick sale, but no word if things are still on schedule.

http://www.endersansible.com/2012/09/24/digital-domain-acquired-by-reliance-mediaworks-and-galloping-horses/

If they are already getting monthly/yearly fees from customers, what's the incentive to produce good products? Now we get to vote by not buying that version and continuing to use an old one. With this new model they'll get money either way.

Their hard core users will probably pay, but many people are occasional users. Free and/or cheaper products will make out big on this. Word processing and spreadsheets aren't exactly cutting edge applications anymore.

Personally I have had one success swapping PCB's on a drive and getting the data off. Of course this requires that the PCB is bad and not the platters. Most bad drives don't sound good (platter issue) so I don't usually bother (ear to drive can tell you a lot).

I have tried the freezer method 3-4 times with no luck, though friends say they have had success.

Usually if the drive is semi-accessible you can use tools like Easy Recovery (OnTrack) or Recuva (Piriform) to get some data off.

Get nearly everyone to wear them and connect them live to the net. Then when anyone does anything "wrong", it will be captured by everyone around them and immediately routed to the authorities.

Thanks, Data Crow is new to me and looks fairly good (first impressions). I still have to figure out how easy it is to get data into it, and how good the export features are.

I've been in limbo since Collectorz destroyed their product by removing the web scraping features a couple years ago (they removed one of the best features and called it an "upgrade").