You had 6 months and you didn't back-up your stuff? Why do you feel there is any blame to be laid at Lacie for this except for the mechanical failure which should have been under warranty? £300 is pretty reasonable for data recovery, it is only meant to be required when the user was dumb enough to not have a single backup. You put all your personal memories, music, films and professional data on one drive and expect sympathy? Learn from this, you are responsible for the safety of your data, have at least 2 backups.