An iMac showing nothing but a question mark. A MacBook with tea through the keyboard. A Mac mini that will no longer wake at all. Provided the storage can be unbolted from the machine, the files usually travel out with it. Apple drives that come apart are routine work at this bench; flash soldered to a logic board is the one thing turned away, and it is turned away honestly.
Nobody is billed for a Mac being looked at. The figure is fixed, written and agreed first — £300 + VAT covers one drive or blade, with no fix no fee on logical faults.
A Mac breaks in much the same ways as anything else with a disk in it. What sets them apart is how little warning they give: the machine behaves impeccably until the morning it does not, and then these are the six things that turn out to have happened.
That icon carries one message and no more: the machine hunted for something to start from and came back empty-handed. Behind it is usually a worn disk or a tired blade SSD. Your documents are seldom part of the problem, and they come off the drive at the bench.
Anything built before roughly 2020 carries a conventional 3.5-inch mechanical disk, and those age exactly the way mechanical disks have always aged: clicking, stalling, dropping off the desktop halfway through the afternoon. They go to the clean bench for donor parts like any other spinning disk.
Fusion presents a mechanical disk and a small SSD to you as one volume. Lose either half and the whole arrangement stops existing, since the map tying them together lives across both. Both parts get copied and the pair is rejoined logically at the bench.
Liquid heads for the logic board long before it reaches the storage, and the storage generally survives it, provided nobody leaves the corrosion quietly spreading for a fortnight. Off, unplugged, out of the house and into the post.
An installer that stops halfway leaves a machine that will not start and a set of files nothing ever touched. The drive is copied, APFS or HFS+ is repaired on that copy, and the data is lifted out of it.
Nothing physically moves when a file is deleted; the space it occupies is simply marked as available again. Pull the plug at that point and most of the recovery is already secured. Leave the machine running and macOS spends the afternoon quietly reusing it.
Every word on this page assumes storage that will separate from the computer around it. In practice the list runs: iMacs and Mac minis up to roughly 2020, whether on a plain SATA disk or a Fusion pairing; MacBooks old enough to carry a 2.5-inch disk; and the plug-in blade modules fitted to MacBooks across the years from about 2010 to 2017. Anything that unbolts and travels can be attempted, and almost all of it succeeds.
From the T2 chip onwards, and on every Apple Silicon model since, the flash is soldered to the logic board and encrypted by hardware that never leaves the machine. Macs of that sort stopped being accepted here a couple of years ago, on the straightforward view that board-level work of that kind belongs with a firm doing nothing else. Anything from 2018 on, ring 0800 689 0668 before it goes near a box and you will have a yes or a no inside a minute.
The storage travels; the computer stays at home. Nothing gets opened up at this bench, though a repair shop in any Merseyside town will lift an iMac panel or take a MacBook base plate off for a small charge. Once out, the drive goes tracked and insured to Manchester Data Recovery, Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN. Assessment costs nothing and closes 2 working days after arrival, and the drive starts back towards you the moment a written figure has been agreed. There are model-by-model notes on the iMac recovery and MacBook recovery pages, and every band is published on the data recovery cost page.
Apple changed file systems in 2017, and a recovery has to know which one it is looking at. HFS+ keeps a catalogue describing every file, along with a journal, and when that catalogue is damaged the repair is a well-worn path. APFS works differently: it writes new data to fresh space rather than over the old, keeps several checkpoints of its own structures, and supports snapshots and clones that share storage between files. On a good day that design is a gift to recovery, because an older checkpoint frequently survives when the current one does not. On a bad day it means space that looks free is holding the only copy of something, which is the technical reason behind the advice to stop using the machine immediately.
It also explains why the ordinary Disk Utility repair is a poor first move on a Mac that is misbehaving. First Aid works on the live volume. If it succeeds you have lost nothing; if it fails partway it can leave the structures in a worse state than it found them, and the copy that would have been recoverable is now the copy it was editing. On a bench the repair is done to an image, so a failed attempt costs nothing but time.
A Fusion setup pairs a small fast SSD with a large mechanical disk and presents them as a single volume. The operating system moves frequently used material onto the fast half and leaves the rest on the slow one, and a map spanning both records where everything currently lives. That map is the weak point. Lose either device and the map is incomplete, so the whole volume stops mounting even though one of the two halves is entirely healthy.
The practical consequence is simple and worth repeating: both halves have to be sent. People frequently post the mechanical disk on the grounds that it is the one making the noise, and the blade stays behind in the machine holding the file system metadata the rebuild needs. Where a Fusion pair is what you have, they travel together and they are quoted as the pair.
FileVault encrypts the whole volume, and where it is switched on the recovery needs either the account password or the recovery key generated when it was enabled. With one of those, the job proceeds normally: the disk is imaged, the image is unlocked, the file system is repaired on the decrypted copy. Without either, there is nothing honest to offer, and any firm suggesting otherwise on a modern Mac is not being straight with you. So it is worth hunting properly before you send anything, in the iCloud account, in a password manager, on the printout somebody made at the time.
Between roughly 2010 and 2017 Apple used plug-in SSD modules that look like an ordinary M.2 blade and are not one. The connector, the pin arrangement and the controller changed several times across those years, so the module out of a 2013 machine will not sit in a 2015 machine, and neither goes into a standard adapter bought on the internet. None of that is a problem at the bench, where the adapters exist, but it does explain why plugging one into a caddy at home usually achieves nothing. Unbolt it, protect the connector, and post it as it is.
Both deserve a plain word, because they lead people to wait when waiting costs them. A Time Machine backup is genuinely valuable, but only as recent as the last time the disk was plugged in, and the drive holding it fails at the same rate as any other. A great many of the external drives arriving at this bench turn out to be somebody's only backup, which is a sentence worth reading twice.
iCloud is not a backup at all in the sense people mean. With storage optimisation switched on, a file may exist as a placeholder locally and in full only in the cloud, or the reverse, and material that was never uploaded is not there in any form. On a machine that will not start, working out which of your folders were genuinely synchronised is part of the assessment rather than something to assume in advance. If in doubt, treat the disk as the only copy and behave accordingly: power off, and let somebody read it properly.
Free diagnosis, a written figure, no fix no fee on logical work. Start online or ring the freephone line.
Nearly everything on this bench arrived by tracked, insured post. It is the calmest way to move a failing drive, and a parcel handed in anywhere on Merseyside is normally on the bench the next working day.
Still screwed inside a laptop, tower, MacBook, iMac, server or a CCTV recorder? Take the drive out and post that on its own. We do not strip machines here, and any computer shop will do it in a few minutes. The one job nobody can take on is flash soldered straight to a logic board, as on Apple Silicon Macs and a handful of very slim laptops: if the storage will not unbolt, there is nothing to send.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it to Manchester Data Recovery. It is roughly 35 miles from Liverpool along the M62 if you fancy the run, and next working day by tracked post if you do not. We ring or email the moment it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes 2 working days after that.
Not sure what belongs in the parcel? Call 0800 689 0668 before you tape it shut, or step through the free online diagnostic first.