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Zero Assumption Recovery has been at the top of my list for many years.
Good to know, I had a run in with a data recovery company (Fields Data Recovery) last year that I wish I'd researched a bit better in advance. Let's just say I wish I'd seen this site: https://data-recovery-blog.co.uk/ before using them, but it was a recommendation from a friend that I trusted (who said they did good things for them at a fair price).
I was strung along by a few "we're almost there" lines whilst I willingly and knowingly gave them more info as to how important the files might be to me. In the end they quoted a figure I wasn't willing to pay (£645+VAT), and so I rejected that and asked for the HDD back. All in all I only ever paid ~£7 to post the drive to them in the first place, they posted it back to me for free. If they had quoted ~£200 and just did it without the "almost there!" stuff I would have paid.
It was giving proper hardware errors before sending it (which is why I didn't want to make it worse by trying to do the recovery myself) and was not in any better shape by the time it came back.
In the end I found an image of all the files I was looking for on another HDD, so I didn't have to worry about this one.
Greenbank-
Zero Assumption Recovery cost $69 as a one off, and it was definitely worth it.
In my case I think my NAS had started to write over the file system so lost the partitions, but ZAR found the previous EXT partitions, and recovered pretty much everything to my knowledge, and preserved 95% of the file names and folders.A lot of recovery software just recovers the files, but renames them in numerical order, which is no good when you have tens of thousands of mp3s...
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I've used kingdomdatarecovery.co.uk
They weren't able to recover any data (the write head had pretty much physically scrubbed the disc surface) even with a donor drive that was 2 numbers away in the serial number.
They didn't dick me about though - they quoted £400 from the off, and only contacted me to ask if the drive had been previously opened, which would mean they would have to use a dirty clean room.
Once they couldn't do anything, they said so, and said I could have the drives back for £10 p&p, or they could dispose of them for me.
Acliff
NotThamesWater
Zero Assumption Recovery has been at the top of my list for many years.
Never failed, except where there is a hardware problem.