A MacBook rarely makes a scene about failing. It refuses the charger, or goes to sleep and stays there, or displays a question mark folder in front of a full cafe. Where the storage is the removable sort — a SATA disk in the older machines, Apple's slide-out blade through the 2013 to 2017 range — the files have very probably come through the whole business, spilled coffee included.
Every apple macbook job is diagnosed free. The quote follows in writing, fixed, before a screwdriver is picked up.
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.
The first job on any apple macbook is matching the symptom to the fault — and after twenty-odd years, these thirty account for very nearly everything that comes through the door.
Whatever the liquid, it runs across the logic board, and the storage sits higher up and stays dry. Board and data have separate futures, and only one of them is our concern.
The board has gone and the data has not. It is waiting on the removable drive or the blade, and extraction beats board repair for both speed and certainty.
Internal storage failed, or it has lost the operating system it was supposed to be holding. Imaging comes first and theorising comes second, and that is house rule rather than preference.
Died mid-install and has been looping ever since. The documents sit out the whole performance untouched on the module, which is worth knowing while you wait.
Those carry ordinary spinning disks, so they suffer ordinary head failures. Filtered-air cases with well-understood endings, and the age of the machine makes no difference to the outcome.
The 2013 to 2017 gumsticks go the way of all flash, which is to say suddenly. They image here on native adapters, with no donor Mac anywhere in the room at any stage.
Disk Utility took the instruction at face value. Carving brings it back while the freed blocks stay idle, so the lid stays shut from now until it is posted.
With the password or the recovery key supplied, encrypted volumes recover as everyday work. Find one before you ring rather than after.
Both survive until their blocks are reused. Retire the machine today and tomorrow will still hold most of what was on it.
Display failures of that era imprison perfectly good files behind a dark screen. Getting them out is the entire brief, and it is a short one.
Now and then an SSUBX or an SSPOLARIS loses its mapping and leaves the bus without saying anything. Service-mode ground, and thoroughly walked.
2009 to 2012 machines wear through the internal SATA cable and stage a very convincing drive failure. Freed from the machine, the disk images perfectly, which is a cheap surprise as surprises go.
Swelling cells bow the chassis and put load on the board, while the storage unplugs unharmed. Stop charging it today rather than at the weekend.
A spill's preferred entrance, shorting the lower board while the storage above stays dry. We have watched this particular film a great many times.
Blades declared dead on other benches get a genuine second attempt on different adapters here. Occasionally that second attempt is the whole recovery, which says more about adapters than about anybody's skill.
Heat ages the blade and the battery together, and the read errors turn up weeks after the sunshine that caused them.
The signature of flash failing by degrees rather than all at once. It gets imaged before the degrees run out, which they do without warning.
Erased ready for sale and the backup never verified. Carving the old volume returns whatever that erase did not physically overwrite, which is often a great deal more than expected.
A dozing pre-2012 machine still has platters turning. One rucksack hitting the floor costs it heads, and donors are what reopen the conversation.
Crush damage cracks the board at its slimmest point while the module shrugs it off entirely. Module out, module imaged, matter closed.
The £9 knockoff with strong views about voltage retires the board in a single evening. Storage rarely notices — out it comes and on it goes.
Aftermarket M.2 modules in adapter sleds arrive with their own firmware quirks and their own failure habits. Imaged natively whatever the sticker on top claims.
Enough long presses on the power button will eventually shred the APFS container metadata. That is rebuilt from a full image of the module, rather than by running repairs on the machine.
That well-known dedicated-GPU death takes the picture and the ability to boot, and never the disk itself. Send the drive alone and it images just like any other.
The firmware lock brings the machine to a polite halt. On pre-T2 machines the storage does not care in the slightest: removed, imaged, recovered.
Apple fitted a dedicated data-recovery connector to some T2 boards, and people quite reasonably ask about it. It requires a board that still works and Apple's own tooling, so it is no help at all when the board is the thing that died. Those machines are declined here, and we would rather tell you that now than after the postage.
A macOS update rewrites the partition map and the Windows side disappears from view, along with everything on it. The data is intact and the map is what needs rebuilding, which is straightforward from an image and risky on the live disk.
Machines carried daily along the north Norfolk coast pick up corrosion on connectors and board edges long before anything is spilled on them. It shows up as intermittent faults first and a dead machine later. Cleaned, neutralised and imaged, most of them give everything back.
A previous repair attempt applied heat to the board with the storage module still fitted nearby. The board came back and the module did not. What survives is read at chip level, and it is worth attempting rather than assuming.
Somebody turns on encryption and macOS starts working through the disk in the background. On a drive with spreading bad sectors that is thousands of extra reads and writes at the worst possible moment, and the volume is left half encrypted. Both states are handled from an image, one region at a time.
What decides it is the storage, not the year printed on the receipt. Anything up to 2012 holds a standard 2.5-inch SATA disk, which is about the plainest Mac work there is. The range from 2013 to 2017 holds Apple's own blade SSD, equally straightforward with the right adapter to hand, and that generation still covers most of the Airs and Pros in daily use around Norfolk. Both types unplug, get copied, and go home. Then 2018 brings the T2 chip, Apple Silicon follows, and the SSD becomes part of the logic board with hardware encryption wrapped round it. When a board of that era dies the data cannot be lifted off it by us or by anybody else being straight with you, and about two years ago these jobs stopped being accepted because too few of them succeeded to justify charging for the attempt. The model number is printed in small type underneath if you are unsure which generation is in front of you.
Liquid reaches the logic board first and soaks up most of the damage that would otherwise arrive at the storage. Lifted out of a machine with a removable disk or blade, that storage generally copies without complaint after cleaning and treatment. The ones that end badly are lost to optimism rather than to chemistry — a charger plugged in to see, a fortnight inside a bag of rice, an evening spent on top of a radiator. Off, unplugged, and moving quickly: do those three and most of the battle is won before anything has been posted anywhere.
The whole art with a MacBook is getting the module onto a bench quickly, natively, and without adventures along the way:
Every gumstick and the twelve-plus-sixteen pin variants connect natively for imaging. No cannibalised MacBook is used as a host at any stage of the job.
Spinning drives out of the pre-2012 machines get the full classical treatment, donor heads included, in filtered air.
Spill-damaged blades and connectors get cleaned, neutralised and dried out until they read steadily enough to image properly rather than intermittently.
Both file systems parsed natively, snapshots retrieved, and FileVault opened with the credentials you supply.
Lost volumes, snapshots and files come back by carving while their freed blocks remain unclaimed, which is a matter of days rather than weeks.
Modules written off elsewhere get a fresh attempt on different hardware. Now and then that alone closes the case.
The line falls at 2018. On the near side of it, drives and blades come out and this workshop recovers them as everyday work. Beyond it, T2 and Apple Silicon bond encrypted storage into the logic board, and there is no honest promise to be made about that. Spill survivors, frayed cables impersonating dead drives, blades that forgot their own names — they all end the same way, which is module out, module imaged, files home. The diagnostic costs nothing and takes two working days from the day it lands on the bench.
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.
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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.
Diagnosis free, one figure written down, most work under no fix no fee. Start online, or ring us.