Or write it off to experience and learn from it. Do regular backups, and
remember backups are useless unless you test them and ensure they work.

I was doing backups of critical data, and that is why I'm not prepared to pay
a lot of $$$ for data recovery. :P
However, I'm prepared to pay a little bit for recovery of the rest of the
data. I think that if I could purchase another such disk even with bad
electronics, but with good mechanics, and then I could recover the data, even
if I open the disk not in a virtually dust free conditions.

a.