Drive recovery

Just my luck! I'm making the final backup copy of my old Mac G3, and one of the drives dies, and my other backup wasn't. I take it apart - it's a 20 gig IBM Deskstar DTLA-305020, just old enough for the (cough) ten-year-rule, and well-known prone to two modes of failure, click of death and NVRAM failure. I'm hearing the NVRAM failure sound as shown at: http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/ibm-deskstar-hard-disk-drive-data-loss.htm In googling, I saw one reference to someone replacing the 8-pin NVRAM themselves from a donor drive, but that seems risky to me. I think I'll send it to Gillware.com, a Madison, WI-based recovery place. They offer $400-700 Windows recovery but charge a premium for Mac recovery ($700-$1000) and Linux ($800-1000), with the higher price for "clean room recovery". (Hmm, I thought bits were bits.) Any other advice - besides a better backup strategy? - John