Canonical Answer to Data Recovery With Sandy and some of the new questions popping up like this one: All servers flooded by salt water, is it possible to recover data from multi-platter drives? It seems like we may want to setup a standard data recovery question that lists potential things to do in the event of a data recovery scenario. By default all questions like this tend to solicit lots of debate and ideas as to what can be done. Should we setup a new canonical answer regarding data recovery and then mark all others as duplicates?

I would troll around for a good data recovery question that's already been thoroughly answered and make that one the canonical example. We've answered the question more than once in the past

It gets a bit more complicated with Data Recovery as sometimes it's physical damage where other times it's accidental erasure, and the process for tape versus HD may be a little different (more you can try with tapes before shipping them off), so maybe something like the Capacity Planning question that then links to physical versus digital questions might be sensible...