A MacBook almost never makes a big deal out of failing. The laptop will refuse the charger, or go into sleep mode and stay there, or display a question mark folder on screen in a crowded cafe. When you've got one that has the removable type of storage (a SATA hard drive in an older MacBook, or Apple's slide-out blade from 2013 to 2017), the files most likely came through all of this, including the coffee spills.
Every Apple MacBook job is diagnosed free. The quote is written out and fixed before we even pick up a screwdriver.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Electronic, mechanical, chip-level and physical work is charged at 50% upfront. Ransomware, forensic, BitLocker and CCTV/DVR jobs are charged 100% upfront on acceptance of our fixed quotation. Please refer to the data recovery cost page for full details on costs.
The first thing we do with every Apple MacBook is match the symptoms to the fault, and after twenty-odd years there are about thirty faults that account for almost all the problems people bring us.
Regardless of what liquid spills onto a MacBook's logic board, the storage sits above it and stays dry. The board and the data have separate paths forward, and we only care about one of those.
The board is dead; but the data isn't. It's simply waiting on the removable drive or the blade, and extracting the data is faster and also more certain than trying to fix the board.
Your internal storage may have failed, or it may have lost the operating system it was supposed to be holding. In both cases imaging happens first and theorising second, which is a house rule for us, not a preference.
The machine died during the install and has looped since then. The documents have sat out the entire performance untouched on the module, which is good to know while waiting.
Those machines have ordinary spinning disks, so they experience ordinary head failure. Head-swap bench cases with an established end result, and the age of the machine does not change the outcome.
Gumsticks from 2013 to 2017 fail like all flash does: suddenly. They are imaged here on native adapters without a donor Mac present in the room at any time.
Disk Utility simply took the instruction literally. Carving brings it back while the freed blocks stay unused, so keep the lid shut from now until it is posted.
As long as the password or recovery key is provided, encrypted volumes recover as everyday work. It would be better to find one before you call us instead of after.
Both will keep the data until the blocks are reused. Retire the machine today and most of what was on it should still be there tomorrow.
The display failures of that era can lock up perfectly good files behind a black screen. Freeing those files is the whole job, and it is a short one.
Now and then an SSUBX or an SSPOLARIS loses its mapping and drops off the bus without saying anything. Service mode ground, and well walked.
Machines produced between 2009 and 2012 wear through their internal SATA cables and fake a very convincing drive failure. Once removed from the machine, the disk images perfectly, which is a cheap surprise as surprises go.
Swelling cells bend the chassis, putting stress on the board, while the storage unplugs undamaged. Stop charging it today instead of at the weekend.
The spill's preferred route in, shorting the bottom board and leaving the storage located above it dry. We have seen this movie a great many times.
Blades found to be "dead" on other benches receive a genuine second chance using different adapters here. On occasion, that second chance is all the recovery needed, which tells us more about adapters than about anyone's skills.
Heat ages both the battery and the blade together, so bad reads can take weeks to appear after the sunshine that caused them.
Flash that is degrading step by step rather than all at once. We image it before those steps run out, which will be with no prior notice.
Erased and prepared for sale, but the backup was not checked. Carving the old volume returns the data that the erase did not physically overwrite, which often includes substantially more than expected.
A pre-2012 machine that is asleep still has platters turning. One rucksack hitting the floor costs it its heads, and donors are what restart the discussion.
Crush damage breaks the board at its thinnest point and the module completely ignores it. Module out, module imaged, issue closed.
The £9 knockoff charger with firm opinions about voltage will retire the board in a single evening. The storage rarely notices; out it comes and on it goes.
Aftermarket M.2 modules in adapter sleds each arrive with their own firmware quirks as well as their own failure habits. Regardless of the sticker on the front, we image them all natively.
Enough long presses of the power button will shred the APFS container metadata. The metadata is rebuilt from a full image of the module rather than by doing repairs on the machine.
The well-known dedicated GPU death takes away the picture and the ability to boot, but never the disk itself. If you send us only the drive we can image it just as easily as any other.
Firmware lock brings the machine to a polite halt. On pre-T2 machines the storage doesn't give two hoots about it: removed, imaged, recovered.
Apple fitted a connector specifically for data recovery to some T2 boards, and people quite reasonably ask about it. It needs a board that still works and Apple's own tooling, so if the board has stopped working it is no help at all. Because of this, those machines are declined here, and we'd like to let you know that before you pay for postage.
A macOS update alters the partition map and removes the Windows side completely from view (along with everything on that side); however, the data is still there. Rebuilding the map is straightforward when done off an image. It is much riskier if you do this directly on the live disk.
Machines carried every day along the north Norfolk coast pick up corrosion on the connector pins and board edges long before any spill happens. The corrosion first causes intermittent faults, and later the complete failure of the machine. Most of them will give everything back after being cleaned, neutralised and imaged.
A previous repair attempt used heat on the board while the storage module was still fitted nearby. Although the board came back, the storage module did not. What survives is read at chip level, and this should be attempted rather than assuming nothing is there.
Someone turns on encryption and macOS begins working through the disk in the background. On a disk with spreading bad sectors that means thousands of additional reads and writes at the worst possible time, and the volume is left half encrypted. Both states are handled from an image, one region at a time.
What decides it isn't the date printed on your receipt; it's the storage. Up to 2012, Mac laptops came with a standard 2.5-inch SATA hard drive, which is about as plain as Mac work gets. From 2013 through 2017, Apple used their own blade SSDs, which are just as straightforward with the correct adapter to hand, and this generation includes most of the Airs and Pros in daily use here in Norfolk. Both types unplug, get copied, and go home. In 2018 Apple began using the T2 chip, followed by Apple Silicon, and the SSD became part of the logic board with a layer of hardware encryption around it. If the logic board of one of those generations dies, the data cannot be lifted off it by us, nor by anyone else being honest with you, and about two years ago we stopped accepting these jobs because too few attempts succeeded to justify charging for them. The model number is printed in small type underneath if you are unsure which generation you have.
Most liquid will reach the logic board first and therefore take most of the damage that would have gone to the storage. Removed from a machine with a removable disk or blade, with the proper cleaning and treatment, the storage should generally copy without complaint. The ones that end badly are lost to optimism: a charger plugged in to see, a fortnight in a bag of rice, an evening on top of a radiator. Turn it off, unplug it and move quickly, and most of the battle is won before anything has been posted.
The entire "art" with a MacBook lies in getting the module to the bench quickly, natively, and without any adventures along the way:
All gumsticks and the twelve-plus-sixteen pin versions connect natively for imaging. No cannibalised MacBook is ever used as a host at any part of this process.
All spinning drives from the pre-2012 machines receive the full classical treatment, donor heads included, on the head-swap bench.
Blades and connectors damaged by spills receive cleaning, neutralising and drying until they give steady reads instead of intermittent ones and can be imaged properly.
We parse both file systems natively and retrieve snapshots; we also open FileVault using the credentials you provide.
Lost volumes, snapshots or files are recovered by carving while their freed blocks are still unclaimed, which is a matter of days, not weeks.
Modules that were "written off" elsewhere receive another attempt using other equipment. Occasionally, this single step is enough to close the case.
The line falls at 2018. On the near side of the line, drives and blades come out and this shop recovers those as normal business. Beyond that line, T2 and Apple Silicon merge encrypted storage into the logic board, and there is no honest promise to make about that. Spill survivors, frayed cables masquerading as dead drives, blades that have forgotten their own names: they all end up the same way. That's module out, module imaged, files home. The diagnostic costs you nothing and takes 2 working days from when it hits the bench.
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.
Free diagnosis, one fixed figure written down, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start online or ring us.