An iMac showing the flashing folder, a MacBook that met a mug of tea, a Mac mini that will not wake up. Where the storage can be taken out of the machine, the data can very often be brought back. Apple storage that unbolts is ordinary work here, and boards with the flash soldered on are our one honest refusal.
Every Mac job is diagnosed free. One fixed written figure before any work — a single drive or blade SSD recovery is £300 + VAT, no fix no fee on logical cases.
Macs go wrong in much the same ways as everything else. They are simply better at keeping quiet about it until the morning you need them, and these are the cases Norfolk's Apple owners post in.
That symbol means the machine looked for a system to start from and found none, and underneath it is usually a tired disk or blade SSD. Your documents are generally untouched and come off the drive on the bench.
iMacs built before about 2020 carry ordinary 3.5-inch mechanical disks, and they age as mechanical disks always have: clicking, stalling, vanishing off the desktop. Clean bench, donor parts, exactly as with any other drive.
Fusion spans a mechanical disk and a small SSD as though they were one volume, so losing either half brings the whole arrangement down. Both are copied and the pair rejoined logically.
A drink through the keyboard heads for the logic board first. The storage tends to come through it, provided nobody leaves the corrosion working away for a fortnight. Off, unplugged, in the post.
An update abandoned partway leaves a Mac that will not start and a set of files nothing ever went near. We copy the drive, repair APFS or HFS+ on the copy, and lift the data out.
Files put out with the Trash stay where they were until something writes over them, so shutting the Mac down is most of the job done.
Everything on this page applies to Apple storage that can be taken out of the machine. In practice that means the SATA disks and Fusion pairings in iMacs and Mac minis up to roughly 2020, the 2.5-inch disks in older MacBooks, and the plug-in blade SSDs Apple fitted from about 2010 to 2017. If the storage will come out of the case, there is very little on it we cannot attempt.
Once Apple introduced the T2 chip, and again on every Apple Silicon model, the flash was soldered onto the logic board and locked behind encryption held inside the machine itself. A couple of years ago we stopped taking those Macs on, having concluded that board-level work of that sort belongs with a firm that does nothing but. Anything from 2018 onwards, ring 0800 689 0668 before it goes in a box and you will get a straight yes or no.
Send the storage by itself and leave the computer at home. Opening machines is not something we do here, but a computer shop in any town will have an iMac panel or a MacBook base plate off for very little. The drive then travels to our Cambridge location, tracked and insured, is diagnosed free of charge inside 2 working days, and sets off home again as soon as you have agreed the written figure. Model-by-model notes sit on the iMac recovery and MacBook recovery pages, with the money on the data recovery cost page.
Diagnosis free, figure written down, logical work under no fix no fee. Start online, or ring us.
Most of what reaches this bench arrived by tracked, insured post. It is the steadiest way to move a poorly drive, and a parcel posted in Norfolk is usually on the bench the next working day.
Is the drive still bolted inside a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV / DVR recorder? The hard drive or SSD needs to come out first, and only the bare drive travels — taking drives out of machines is not something we do here. Storage soldered to a motherboard (Apple Silicon Macs, one or two very thin laptops) is the single thing beyond us: if it will not come out, it cannot come in.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Mark the parcel for the attention of Cambridge Data Recovery. From Norwich it is about an hour and twenty down the A11, then two minutes off the A14 at Junction 32 — or next working day by tracked post. You hear from us as soon as it is booked onto the bench.
Unsure what to put in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you seal it, or run the free online diagnostic.