I no longer do data recovery (as a business) but I do freebies for mates because I know the pain of being seperated from your data
There is no single method that works, it all comes down to "it depends why the need to recover". The freezer trick can sometimes work but silly tricks like that are a last resort once you've exhausted the sensible options. Spinrite is just a damn useful tool to use for different purposes. In many cases it IS a best first step for some types of hardware failures where sector loss is creeping, to stabilise the drive long enough to take a raw copy. Its also essential if you buy second handdrives off ebay to thoroughly test a drive to make sure you can trust using it. I have a ton of spare drives in the garage I fully test and format to make sure I can use them or give them out. But like any tool if you have no idea what you're doing, or worse think you are an expert already then you are going to use tools like Spinrite at the wrong time.