Data recovery question
 

How is it possible to recover missing files without sending your drive out to a company and risk something happening to the drive? (Or….Why is it not necessary to send your drive out to a company to recover your files?)

It all depends on the issue. There are lots of software that you can use to recover the data.

Indeed, there are a lot of data recovery utilities.

For instance,

Acronis RecoveryExpert Deluxe
Ontrack EasyRecovery
Active boot disk
Active Partition Recovery
HDD Regenerator

Also,

Partition Recovery
R-Studio
Zero Assumption Recovery
Office DocumentsRescue Professional
PC Inspector FileRecovery
Roxio GoBack
Recuva
Undelete Plus
CDCheck

Yes it is possible to recover data from your disk.There are many software available in the market.
Alexandre is already mentioned some software above.
It is not neccessary to send your disk to some company for data recovery because they dont know how critical is your data or may be they misuse your data....you never know.