$50 per hour. This rate is static minus discounts.

I do believe in constantly educating yourself in this field of work, however, formal education is much too slow. By the time you finish a semester of formal schooling, you're already behind. The best thing you can do is read, read, read. Magazines, blogs, whitepapers, etc. Anything that will keep you aware of changes in the industry and give you the ability to see what is coming.

By far the most common types of jobs are virus removal and data recovery. Because of the increasing sophistication in targeted attacks, the need to protect computers from simple page-click attacks to more sophisticated worms that embed themselves in legitimate applications has also increased significantly. Data recovery is a common but complex problem that requires not only ingenuity to resolve, but also proactive measures to keep from having to recover the data in the first place. Why? Because typically, data recovery is expensive. Again, why? Well, typically, the data is usually personal and very meaningful to the individual or business that needs it. However, it is my belief that there will always be a need to recover data simply because hardware has a shelf life. This is just the nature of IT since things are running usually 24/7. Disks get used as long as you're doing anything on a computer, and sometimes when you're not. For instance, with automatic updates, where don't even have to be signed into the computer. With that in mind, I provide data recovery services with the intent of making sure that a client is able to resume as usual as if nothing ever happened and without incurring a significant cost.