Drive recovery

[John Foust]

Just my luck!  I'm making the final backup copy of my old Mac G3,
and one of the drives dies, and my other backup wasn't.

I take it apart - it's a 20 gig IBM Deskstar DTLA-305020, just
old enough for the (cough) ten-year-rule, and well-known prone to 
two modes of failure, click of death and NVRAM failure.  I'm hearing
the NVRAM failure sound as shown at:

http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/ibm-deskstar-hard-disk-drive-data-loss.htm

In googling, I saw one reference to someone replacing the 8-pin NVRAM
themselves from a donor drive, but that seems risky to me.

I think I'll send it to Gillware.com, a Madison, WI-based recovery
place.  They offer $400-700 Windows recovery but charge a premium
for Mac recovery ($700-$1000) and Linux ($800-1000), with the higher
price for "clean room recovery".  (Hmm, I thought bits were bits.)  
Any other advice - besides a better backup strategy?

- John