If the files are that important to you then just pay the piper and get them, quit b.s.ing around with other programs. The longer your hard drive runs the more data gets overwritten and the higher your risk is for a crash or other things.
If the data is that important just pay the money, get the data, save it in a safe place, burn 10 copies of it, and consider this a lesson learned. $199 is a small price to pay for getting back PRICELESS memories.
FYI, most retail services START at $259 for data rescue, which can easily ballon up to $1,000+ depending on the state of the hard drive and how much effort is required to try to rescue the data. Consider $199 a bargain, especially since you will be able to reuse that program in case any future disasters happen on your computer or your friends computers (and charge 'em for it!) where as professional data rescue firms will charge you more for one time use.
In the future, always have multiple backups of irreplaceable files.
I keep all my files on my iMac, my 500GB WD external hard drive, and the REALLY important stuff like family photos, old documents from school I want to keep, etc. I keep burned onto DVDs and stored away in a safe place as well. I tend to burn at least two DVDs on different media (like different brands or types) so that in case one of those fails I got it backed up.
Lastly, with MobileMe jacking up their online storage to 20GB I will also be storing all the irreplaceable files in the cloud as well (I have maybe 12 GB of family photos and maybe 1GB of miscellaneous files that I would like to keep forever).
It all sounds elaborate, but if you do it on a fairly regular basis it really only takes an extra couple minutes (to burn a 2nd copy, for example, or copy and paste to the external HD).
