One single question can provide nearly all the information you need about recovering your Mac. Does the physical drive actually come out? Through approximately 2017 it generally did on the majority of Mac computers; and on those, the overall condition of the rest of the computer hardly matters. Take out the drive, and there are plenty of cases where a Mac that won't turn on can be recovered for a relatively low cost. As of 2018, however, the flash memory has been attached via solder to the logic board, and the logic board encrypts it via an encryption chip that is built into it. In addition, we do not recover soldered-on storage. Thirty seconds viewing “About This Mac” shows you which category your Mac falls into.
Click the “Apple” menu then click “About This Mac”. The year and chip model listed will show you if the drive comes out or not and whether this is routine work or a job we cannot accept. Nothing else you know about the machine is more important than that.
Most labs hide this away. We'd rather start with it, since so many of the machines in this city are Macs.
On a T2 or Apple Silicon computer, your storage is soldered directly to the logic board of that computer and it’s encrypted with a chip also on the board of that computer. There is no copy of the key anywhere else. It isn’t written down, Apple doesn’t hold one, iCloud won’t get one back for you, and it can’t even be extracted from the chip.
This means that if your board will not turn on, then your data is unrecoverable. It's not just difficult, not just expensive, and not about who knows how to do it: there is simply nothing that can be done. Anybody that tells you they can recover your data from a failed board is either going to try to fix the board at circuit level (and call it a successful recovery), or is lying to you.
If your board is still turning on, then get everything you can from your Mac by yourself before anything else happens to it. Because we only work on removable drives, a Mac with its internal storage on the board is a job we won't be able to perform and we would rather let you know this over the telephone than after you have sent it to us.
Before you assume the worst. A Mac that will not turn on may not mean the board has died. Screens, keyboards, batteries, chargers and ports all fail without hurting the logic board. Get your Mac checked before making such an assumption.
The Mac is unable to locate a bootable operating system. Frequently, this is due to corrupted APFS containers versus dead drives, and often the underlying data is completely untouched.
The mechanical side of a Fusion pair has failed and there is a broken logical volume that spans both disks. You must send us both drives, removed from your machine, to rebuild it.
Full-disk encryption is working as designed. We need either the password or the recovery key to get in.
Corrosion is moving across the board over days/weeks. On non-soldered storage devices this rarely matters: just take the drive out and send it. On soldered devices there is now a race against time for the board; with soldered storage we will not be able to recover the data.
Design studios, research groups, architectural firms, media companies and a large share of the science park run Apple machines, so Apple hardware makes up a bigger proportion of what we see at our bench than it would in an industrial town. Most of it is recoverable and much of it is standard: old iMacs/MacBooks where drives fail, Fusion pairs where the mechanical half fails, external Time Machine disk units which no longer mount.
Soldered storage is an exception, as mentioned previously in the soldered storage section. We also hit it more often than we would like due to the local machine mix. This is why that part of the page is so high up instead of way down near the bottom.
Mac recovery for machines with removable storage (this will cover all machines up to roughly 2017 and quite a few newer ones) is from £300 +VAT. There is a cost of £550 +VAT flat for rebuilding Fusion Drives; this is because both drives are needed, and the logical volume spanning them needs to be put back together.
We do not take on soldered storage, which includes all T2 and Apple Silicon machines, and we do not provide quotations or charges for recovering it. So when you call us, you'll know right away before sending your item.
The year your Mac was made will determine how much of an issue this will be. Until approximately 2017, on most models you could just pull the hard drive out of your Mac and send it, and its condition barely mattered. But since 2018, the flash storage has been attached to the motherboard using solder. That makes it impossible for us to get back.
The Mac cannot locate a bootable operating system. Often this is due to a corrupted APFS container as opposed to failure of a drive, and the data below is frequently intact. Do not reinstall macOS, since reinstalling would very likely replace data that you wish to recover.
No. When you send your Mac in for repairs, Apple will exchange parts but explicitly does not restore data, and a repair usually means your storage is replaced and the original thrown away. Therefore, when sending your Mac in for repairs with valuable information stored on the internal drive, you should come to a recovery lab first to see about recovering that data prior to having it sent in for repairs.
Both drives, taken out of the iMac. We will not accept your entire Mac. In order to rebuild a single Fusion volume, which spans an SSD and a hard disk, we require metadata from each half of the Fusion volume. Although only one side of the Fusion volume has typically failed, we still need to have access to metadata from both sides of the Fusion volume.
Only if you do not know the password to FileVault and have lost your recovery key. You can get into your encrypted files using either method. Without both methods, there is simply no way into FileVault: that is its purpose.
Yes, regularly. External backup drives such as those used by Time Machine are standard external drives running a sparse bundle. These drives have the same probability of failure as every other external. Additionally, these types of external drives are often the copy that is found to have been silently failing over several months.
£300 +VAT if the storage comes out; £550 flat if you have a Fusion Drive. We don’t work on soldered storage and you’ll find this out before you send anything, not after we send you a bill.