For drives that are out-of-service, once the drives have been removed and properly labeled, it should take about 10 minutes to set up each drive on a forensics station for copying, and probably about 2-3 hours for each one to copy. For convenience sake, let's say they can image three drives per workstation, per 8 hour day. On a single forensics workstation, then, it'd take a little over a month to image them all.

For drives that are installed in machines that are in-service, it's even easier, since they don't have to buy or build new PCs to run the imaging process.

Even so, let's be aggressive. Let's say they're setting up 10 forensics workstations. You can pick up a nice Dell Vostro (including flat panel monitor) for about $700 each. They don't need a whole lot of power or a fancy graphics card to make a copy of a hard drive. All they need is a good hard drive interface, which comes on just about every motherboard made these days. Let's splurge and say it'll cost $1,000 if they add shipping and some add-ons.

At worst, ten of those are $10,000. Then add ten copies of Ghost for another $700. Now let's get 40 add-on 1TB drives for about $15,160 (figuring $379 each). So that's $25,860 all told for hardware. If they want copies of Microsoft Outlook for all of these forensics stations, add another $100 each, or $1,000 total. So now they're at $26,860. By the way, this assumes they'll be paying retail, not counting bulk discounts or calling some favors in from friends.

Theresa Payton said it'd cost $50,000 per data item restored (I'm assuming this means just one email message), so let's pad the cost of this whole forensics recovery suite (for everything, not just one email, but for the whole shebang) to $50,000. That'd take into account extra wires, unforeseen parts, and shipping. Remember, that's a highly padded estimate; I honestly think it'll more likely cost about $27,000.

Now, not counting some experts like me or our DominoPower and OutlookPower Magazine readers, and facilities space, they're at a worst-case cost of about $50,000 for this particular technology. Sure, they could spend a ton more, but since Payton said all they're dealing with is PST files, they're probably pretty safe at $50,000.

So, let's burden it up. Let's assume they need to pay for space. Let's call that $5,000 for an office suite for a month or so. Now, let's put in three security people, each to watch over the others doing the job. At a $60,000/yr salary (high for security), that's $15,000 for a month. Add a top IT guy at $500 an hour (yes, I know!) and they're at $120,000.

So, let's add it up:

• $50,000 for gear
• $5,000 for office
• $15,000 for security
• $120,000 for tech guy
• Total: $190,000

If they wanted to cover all their bases, they could include some assistants and clerical support, call it $250,000 and be more than able to do this.

Be aware the month estimate here is highly padded. With 10 forensics stations, they could probably get images of everything in a week to a week and a half for 100 computers. I just factored in a month to give wiggle room.