I have plenty of experience rescuing, dumping broken drives and filesystems.
I know how to interpret SMART errors, I know what to look for in the logs and have the revelant skills
to use the following tools for the right job: dd, ddrescue, e2fsck, ntfsfix, ntfsclone, fdisk, gdisk, photorec, testdisk, rsync, tar, cp.
Bear in mind though, that there is a distinction between disk and filesystem tools. Some disk tools
need an extra Disk of equal or greater size (ddrescue) of the original. Also you do need a place to dump your files. This doesn't mean we can't recover, it just limits some options.