Data loss--intentional or otherwise--can be too bitter a pill to swallow for many small and midsize businesses, but one vendor may be able to alleviate some of that pain.

CBL Data Recovery Technologies is ready to come to the rescue of Hewlett Packard customers when a disaster strikes and data on their HP server, notebook, PC, or even HP digital camera becomes inaccessible.

The service, according to CBL in a statement on Tuesday, extends to HP customers in Singapore, India, Taiwan, Australia and China. The CBL-HP tie-up comes at a time when more SMBs are investing money into shoring up their business continuity and disaster recovery plans.

A survey conducted by ZDNet Asia earlier this year, ranked data storage initiatives including backup and recovery as the second most important IT priority among the SMBs. Most respondents also intended to formulate business continuity and disaster recovery plans.

"Data protection is a major concern of businesses today, especially for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). When data is inaccessible, business continuity is affected," said Dennis Mark, vice president of marketing for HP Asia-Pacific and Japan, in a statement.

HP customers simply need to bring their affected media to a local HP service center. They will then be referred to CBL where they will be given a free technical evaluation to determine the type and physical condition of the media, and how much data can be recovered.

The entire evaluation process takes about six hours, and CBL pledges a "no data, no charge" service guarantee to HP customers--this means if CBL is unable to restore the data, customers don't have to pay.

If CBL technicians can salvage the information, customers will be quoted a price and--depending on the degree of difficulty associated with the restoration of data--endure a waiting period of up to 72 hours. Once fully retrieved, the data is then returned on CD or DVD media.

According to CBL, it will perform data recovery on all media, not only HP products.