An iMac showing the flashing folder icon, a MacBook which had a cup of tea poured over it and a Mac mini that won't wake up. Where you can take the storage out of the machine, the data can very often be brought back. Apple storage that unbolts is standard work for us, and boards with the flash soldered on are our only honest refusal.
Every Mac job is diagnosed free. A single fixed written price before any work: a single drive or blade SSD recovery is £300 + VAT, and on logical work, you only pay if we recover your data.
Macs fail just like all other devices. The difference is that they tend to stay quiet about it until the morning you need them, and these are the cases Norfolk's Apple owners post in.
That symbol means the computer looked for a system to start from and found none, and underneath it is generally a tired hard drive or blade SSD. Your documents are usually untouched and come off the drive on the bench.
iMacs built before about 2020 use ordinary 3.5 inch mechanical drives, and they age the way mechanical drives always have: clicking, stalling, disappearing from the desktop. Head-swap bench, donor parts, exactly as with any other drive.
Fusion uses a mechanical disk and a small SSD as if they were one volume, so losing either half brings the whole thing down. Both halves are copied, then joined back together logically.
A drink through the keyboard goes for the logic board first. The storage tends to come through it, unless you leave the corrosion working away for two weeks. Shut off, unplug, post.
An update abandoned partway leaves a Mac that won't start and a set of files nothing ever touched. We copy the drive, repair APFS or HFS+ on the copy, and pull the data out.
Putting something in the Trash doesn't remove it until something else writes over that space, so most of the job is done by simply shutting down the Mac.
Everything on this page relates to Apple storage that can be taken out of the machine. In practice, that means the SATA drives and Fusion pairs in iMacs and Mac minis up to around 2020, the 2.5 inch drives in older MacBooks, and the plug-in blade SSDs Apple fitted from about 2010 to 2017. If the storage will come out, there are very few things on it we won't try.
Once Apple added the T2 chip, and again on every Apple Silicon model, the flash was soldered onto the logic board and protected by encryption held inside the computer itself. A couple of years ago we stopped accepting those Macs, because we felt that board-level work like that belongs with a firm that does nothing else. Anything from 2018 onwards, call us on 0800 689 0668 before putting it in a box, and we'll give you a straight yes or no.
Send the drive on its own and keep the computer at home. We don't open up computers, but a computer shop in any town will take an iMac panel or a MacBook base plate off for very little. The drive then travels to our Cambridge location, tracked and insured, and is diagnosed free within 2 working days, then it goes back home as soon as you agree to the written quote. More model-by-model notes are on the iMac recovery and MacBook recovery pages, and pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
Diagnosis free, figure written down, and on logical work, you only pay if we recover your data. Start online, or ring us.
Most items arrive at this bench by insured and tracked post. We recommend getting a quote first, either by telephone or using our free online diagnostic, and once you have received your quote, simply post the item. Post is the steadiest way to move a poorly drive, and a parcel sent from Norfolk typically arrives on the bench within a working day.
Is the drive still bolted inside a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV / DVR recorder? Before sending, remove the hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD), as we do not accept whole units. From a DVR or recorder, send just the disk. From a server or RAID, take out the disks and clearly label each disk by bay number. A network attached storage (NAS) device may be sent as its disks if they can be removed; otherwise please send the NAS itself. There is only one type of drive we are unable to accept: storage soldered onto a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs, extremely thin laptops). In such cases, if the storage cannot be taken out it cannot be accepted. If you are unsure whether you have a removable drive or not, call us before sending anything.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Please mark the parcel for the attention of Cambridge Data Recovery. It takes about an hour and twenty minutes to travel from Norwich along the A11, then two minutes off the A14 at Junction 32. Otherwise you can post it using a tracked service and we will receive it the following working day. We will contact you as soon as we have your drive and it is booked onto our bench.
If you're unsure of what to include in the box, please call us on 0800 689 0668 before sealing it. Or, for a first view on what we can do, you can use our free online diagnostic.