Well, it really depends on your business model at the end of the day IMO.

That is dictated to you by your customer base, unless you are really obese and want to go on a starvation diet

Data recovery you can more or less charge what you like for, as all the customer will do is Google for it, find one or two of these slick rip-off outfits and discover that you are charging a quarter to a fifth of what the big boys do.

The secret is to talk to the customer and agree what you are going to do. I generally go for time (labour) and materials. If you want fixed price then that price will be very heavily loaded. The big boys generally don't start much below $1500 over here.

OK, I don't have a clean room and all the scanning stuff, but I have only ever had to turn down a couple of jobs, and then I charged them for the investigation. In some respects I have to agree with Net2Infinity that you should be able to give an accurate estimate within an hour.

It is amazing just how unimportant data can become when they know how much it will cost to recover it. I generally don't do data backups. If the customer has anything worthwhile, they will already have backed it up, or I will talk them through how to do it. That way they are not going to have problems the next time? If they really need it, they get to pay for it.

Sure, it can take several hours of elapsed time to clean a machine of crap, which is why I don't do that at a customer's house. I charge for actual time spent, and I can do several cleanups at once in the workshop, or be repairing a machine, upgrading, building new and so on...................all at the same time?

Given that everything is obsolete in 6 months and hardware prices are so low, I generally go for format and reinstall because that is the only cost effective solution. Otherwise buy a new machine? (I will build it and harden it for you ).

As you might imagine, I am in a position to "make my own rules"...............so you will not be surprised how many times I have managed to recover school course and project work (generally a glaring LACK of it?), but was sadly unable to save the pornography, illegally downloaded music, games scores................... Ack! phtt! sometimes I love my work