External hard drive failure.

[bdw]

You can call these guys:
http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com.h...rive-recovery/

But expect it to be VERY expensive.

[flameproof]

A last option could be to take the HDD out of the case and connect it directly to the PCs SATA port. There are also some HDD health and recovery tools around. Google for "hdd diagnostic tools"

[Creative83]

These days I've started using 'Amazon Glacier' to backup all my data. Its a new service thats 10 times cheaper than S3. The cost is only US$0.01 per GB per month. It is amazingly cheap, I spend about $1.50 per month to backup 150GB which is my entire collection of family photos and videos for the last 10 years. It makes dropbox, skydrive, etc seem expensive by comparison and you dont have to fiddle around with storage quota's, store as little or as much as you want on Amazon. Highly recommended.

Any thoughts on dumping it onto a website server?

Ie. disadvantage in comparison to Amazon Glacier?

[jgl]

What's a "website server"?

Glacier is completely different in concept to most cloud storage providers. It's usually much cheaper, but it is completely unsuited to filesharing/synching and you need a third party app to access the storage. It is only useful for long term archiving of data with low probability of having to access said data (as there is a 3-4 hour access delay).

http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/

[GreenCatalonia]

You possibly have a physical error on a hard drive and you're even considering using it again?

Try SPINRITE 6" from GRC.com [about US$80 as I recall].

It can take an age to check on big "Viagra" Disks - but could save you an even bigger fortune in recovery bills if you can DIY !