[bluedino]

> Over the span of about a month, I received very infrequent and vague communications from the company despite me providing extremely detailed technical information and questions.

Ahh the business model of "just tell them to send us the tape and we'll buy the drive on eBay"

[Nextgrid]

To be honest as long as they are very careful about not doing any damage to the original media then it might work and be a win-win for both sides in a "no fix no fee" model where the customer only pays if the data is successfully recovered.

Their cardinal sin was that they irreparably damaged the tape without prior customer approval.

[mrguyorama]

If you are advertising and attempting recovery from formats you are unfamiliar with, damaging the original medium is inevitable.

[Nextgrid]

When a customer shows up with an unfamiliar format you invest the time to become familiar with it - this may involve buying test tapes (that you don't mind damaging) so you can test your recovery process on it and make sure it works before running it on the customer's tape.

[mrguyorama]

Unless you are clearly making the customer aware that you are doing so, I think it's slimey to do so. It's very "fake it till you make it" to advertise a service that you only assume you can pick up as needed.