A restaurant's records sitting on a Mac that powered up to nothing. Recoverable because this model still took a removable blade SSD — and a straight answer on why the newer ones aren't.
← All case files · £300 + VAT flat · Fusion £550 + VAT flat
A restaurant owner brought in a MacBook Air that powered on to a black screen. The backlight came up and the machine chimed, but macOS never loaded. Recovery mode started and showed no startup disk; Disk Utility listed nothing to repair.
On that drive sat supplier invoices, payroll, rotas and stock records — the operating spine of a small business, with no current backup anywhere else.
a pre-2018 machine, which is the single fact that decided whether this job was possible at all.
connected through the correct adapter on a separate system, the blade enumerated intermittently rather than not at all.
so even once the drive could be read, the volume would need rebuilding rather than simply mounting.
With any Mac the first question isn't what has gone wrong, it's what kind of storage the machine has — because on this generation the drive lifts out and can be read on the bench, and on the generation that followed it cannot.
The blade was imaged read-only through a controller-aware route, working in short passes around the points where it dropped off the bus and re-reading unstable regions until they returned consistent results, rather than accepting whatever a first pass produced. Nothing was written to the original at any stage.
From that image the APFS container was rebuilt. The checkpoint metadata was inconsistent, so the volume was reconstructed from the most recent coherent checkpoint and the file records walked forward from there.
Around 98%, including every financial and payroll record the business needed to keep trading. Files were verified by opening them — spreadsheets loaded, invoice PDFs rendered, folder structure matched against what the owner expected to find.
A small number of files sitting in the least stable region of the NAND could not be read consistently. Those were reported by name rather than handed back as silently damaged copies, which is the difference between a recovery and a file count.
This recovery worked because the machine still had a removable blade. That is worth being blunt about, because the answer changed with the hardware. On 2018-and-later Intel Macs with a T2 chip, and on every Apple Silicon model, the flash is soldered to the logic board and encrypted by the security chip, with the key fused to that board. Once the board has failed, the data cannot be recovered — not by us, not by anyone. A chip-off yields encrypted NAND and no key to read it with.
Where a Mac's drive lifts out, recovery is routine: £300 +VAT, or £550 +VAT flat for a Fusion Drive, where two devices are recovered as one volume. Soldered storage is not a service we offer, and we say so at the free diagnostic rather than after a bill. On those machines the backup is the recovery, and it has to exist before the failure.
Where the drive lifts out, yes — it is imaged read-only and the APFS or HFS+ volume rebuilt from the copy. Fusion Drive Macs are recovered as a single logical volume from both devices. Storage soldered to the logic board is not a service we offer.
From £300 plus VAT for models with a removable drive, and £550 plus VAT flat for Fusion Drive Macs, where two devices are recovered as one volume. Most jobs are no fix, no fee, with a free 48-hour diagnostic and a written quote first.
Yes, provided you have the account password or recovery key. FileVault and hardware encryption can only be undone by the owner; we do not and cannot break encryption, so without the credentials even a perfect image yields nothing readable.
Drop the drive at our Oxford Science Park reception, or post it to us — it costs nothing to find out what happened. You get a written figure from the fixed bands before any work begins.