MacBooks fail quietly. The charger gets refused. It sleeps and does not wake. A question mark folder appears in the middle of a busy cafe. If the storage is the removable kind — a SATA disk in older machines, Apple's slide-out blade across 2013 to 2017 — your files have very probably survived the lot, spilled coffee included.
Every apple macbook job is diagnosed free. The fixed figure reaches you in writing first, before any tools come out.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
First job on any apple macbook is matching the symptom to the fault. Twenty-odd years in, these twenty-five cover nearly every one that reaches this bench.
Whatever went in flows across the logic board, while the storage sits above it and stays dry. From that point the board and the data have different futures. Only one of the two is our business.
The board has died and the data has not. Everything is sitting on a removable disk or a blade, waiting for somebody to read it. Extraction beats board repair on speed and on certainty, and it does not depend on a repair holding.
Either the internal storage has failed outright, or it has mislaid the operating system it was holding, and that icon cannot tell the two apart. Image first. Theorise second. House rule here, not a preference.
It stopped mid-install and has looped from that day forward. Your documents watch the whole performance from the module without being touched, which is worth knowing while you wait.
Those machines carry spinning disks, so they suffer head failures like anything else with platters in it. Filtered-air work, endings we understand thoroughly, and the age of the chassis makes no difference to how it finishes.
Gumsticks from the 2013 to 2017 machines end the way flash always ends, which is abruptly. Native adapters here image them, and no donor Mac is present in the room at any stage.
Disk Utility did exactly what it was told, immediately. Carving retrieves the volume while those freed blocks stay idle, so keep the lid closed from now until the module is in a jiffy bag.
Produce the password or the recovery key and an encrypted volume recovers as routine work. Find one before you ring us, because having it changes the shape of the entire job.
Deleted items and snapshots both survive until something else claims their blocks. Retire the machine today and most of it is still there tomorrow. Carry on using it and that ceases to be true.
Display failures of that era lock perfectly good files behind a black screen. Getting them out is the whole brief, and it is a short brief with a predictable ending.
Now and again an SSUBX or an SSPOLARIS mislays its mapping and leaves the bus without comment. Service-mode ground, and thoroughly well walked at this end.
Machines assembled between 2009 and 2012 wear through the internal SATA cable and produce a drive failure convincing enough that most owners believe it. Freed from the chassis, the disk images perfectly. Cheap surprise, as surprises go.
A swelling cell bows the chassis and loads the board, while the storage lifts out undamaged. Stop charging the machine today, not at the weekend, and lift the module out while that remains easy.
A blade written off on another bench gets a proper second run on different adapters here. Every so often that alone is the whole recovery, which reflects on adapters rather than on anybody's ability.
Those are the marks of flash giving way in stages rather than in one go. Image it before the stages are used up, and they get used up without meaningful warning.
Wiped ready for sale, with a backup nobody ever checked. Carving the old volume hands back everything the erase failed to physically overwrite, and that is often far more than the owner dares assume.
Asleep, a pre-2012 machine still has its platters spinning. A rucksack meeting the floor costs it heads, and donor parts are what reopen matters afterwards.
The cheap knockoff with firm opinions about voltage retires a board in one evening. Storage rarely notices. Out it comes, onto the imaging rig it goes, and the job is short.
Hold the power button down often enough and APFS container metadata gets shredded eventually. Rebuilding it happens on a full image of the module, never by running repairs on the machine itself.
That notorious dedicated-GPU death removes the picture and the ability to start up. It never reaches the disk. Post the disk by itself and it images as any other of its generation does.
The firmware lock stops the machine politely and completely. On pre-T2 hardware the storage could not care less: remove it, image it, recover it, and the lock never enters the conversation.
Apple built a dedicated data-recovery connector into some T2 boards, and it is a fair thing to ask about. Using it requires a working board plus Apple's own tooling, so it contributes nothing when the board is the part that died. We decline those machines, and we would rather say so before you spend money on postage.
An update to macOS rewrites the partition map, at which point the Windows side vanishes together with everything on it. Nothing was destroyed. The map is the casualty, and rebuilding it from an image is straightforward, while doing it on a live disk is not.
A machine carried daily along the coast, or down to the harbour, picks up corrosion across connectors and board edges well before any liquid is spilled on it. Intermittent faults arrive first. A dead machine arrives later. Cleaned, neutralised and imaged, most hand everything back.
Encryption gets switched on and macOS begins working through the disk in the background. With bad sectors already spreading, that is thousands of additional reads and writes at the very worst moment, and the volume finishes half encrypted. An image handles both states, region by region.
The storage settles it, not the date on the receipt. Anything up to 2012 carries an ordinary 2.5-inch SATA disk. That is about the plainest Mac job there is. From 2013 to 2017 you get Apple's proprietary blade SSD. Just as straightforward with the correct adapter to hand, and that generation still accounts for a great many Airs and Pros in daily service. Both types unplug, get imaged, and go home. Then 2018 arrives with the T2 chip, Apple Silicon follows it, and from there the SSD is part of the board itself, wrapped in hardware encryption. Once a board of that era dies, nobody being straight with you can lift the data off it — not us, not anybody. Those jobs stopped being accepted about two years ago, because too few succeeded to justify charging for the attempt. MacBook data recovery on the earlier machines, by contrast, is weekly work here. The model identifier is printed in small type on the underside if you are unsure what you are holding.
Liquid hits the logic board first, and the board absorbs most of what would otherwise reach the storage. Lift a removable disk or blade out of a machine like that and it generally images without argument once it has been cleaned and treated. Jobs that end badly are usually lost to optimism, not to chemistry. A charger plugged in to check. A fortnight in a bag of rice. An evening propped on a radiator. Off, unplugged, moving fast. Manage those three and the battle is largely won before a parcel even exists.
The art with a MacBook is short. Get the module onto a bench fast, connect it natively, and have no adventures on the way:
Gumsticks of every shape, twelve-plus-sixteen pin variants included, connect natively for imaging. At no point in any job is a cannibalised MacBook used as a host machine.
Spinning disks out of pre-2012 machines get the classical treatment in filtered air, donor heads included wherever a head has genuinely died.
Blades and connectors damaged by a spill get cleaned, neutralised and dried out until reads come back steady instead of intermittent. Imaging starts after that point.
Native parsing for both file systems, snapshots pulled out, and FileVault opened on whichever credentials you can put your hands on.
Carving retrieves lost volumes, snapshots and files for as long as their freed blocks go unclaimed. That window is measured in days, not months.
Modules written off elsewhere get a fresh run on different hardware. Now and again that alone closes the case, and finding out costs you nothing.
Draw the line at 2018. Before it, disks and blades come out of the machine and this workshop recovers them as routine work. After it, T2 and Apple Silicon weld encrypted storage into the logic board, and no honest promise can be made about that. Spill survivors, worn cables imitating a dead disk, blades that forgot their own names: all of them finish identically. Module out, module imaged, files home. Diagnosis is free and completes two working days after the module lands on the bench.
Nearly everything on this bench came by tracked, insured post. It is the safest way to shift a failing drive, and a parcel handed in at a North-East post office is usually here the next working day.
Still bolted into a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV / DVR box? Get the hard drive or SSD out first. The bare drive travels on its own. Stripping machines down is not a job this lab takes on. Flash soldered to a motherboard, as on Apple Silicon Macs and a couple of very thin laptops, is our one flat no: if it will not unbolt, it cannot be worked on.
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Address it for the attention of Edinburgh Data Recovery. From Aberdeen that is roughly 130 miles and two and a half hours down the A90, or next working day by tracked post if you would rather not make the run. You get a call the moment it is booked onto the bench.
Not sure what belongs in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you tape it shut, or work through the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnosis, one number written down, no fix no fee on the bulk of jobs. Start online or phone it in.