Hard drive recovery company that doesn't shake you down?

Unfortunately, I have to recover data and my backup hard drive is failing. It's a mechanical failure - lots of clicks and some high-pitched squeals.

Looked into hard drive recovery options and it seems like they all want to charge me hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Does anybody know of a reasonably reliable hard drive recovery process that can deal with mechanical failures but at a reasonable price?

At the very least, does anybody know if this company is reliable? http://www.nationwidedatarecovery.com/ They charge $200 which is the least I can find. Or this company, which is at $279 and seems a bit more professional: http://www.aerodr.com/

Data recovery is going to be expensive. One of the company's around here start at $400.

I hate to say it but this is another sad lesson about my motto, "Never keep anything on a computer with out a backup that you cant afford to lose tomorrow."

The problem is that I did have a backup. This was my backup. The original computer was stolen and now my backup is failing at the precise time that I'm trying to restore it. I also had Carbonite but canceled it a few months ago because I had too many problems with it. Wish I had installed Mozy in time.

Does anybody have any specific suggestions for data recovery companys that are both reasonably reliable and reasonably cheap? I don't think that my hard drive is a big problem case, I just need the motor replaced I think.

Edit: At this point I guess I am resigned to paying a few hundred dollars for this, and I know that there are a lot of companies out there who offer such services for a few hundred, so I'm wondering which of those you would recommend.

http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/ is probably not the cheapest, in fact they may be the most expensive, but I recall using their disk tools back with DOS 3.0. The few people I've talked to that used their recovery services have had good things to say.