Devices · Mac & MacBook
Three aspects of how Macs are designed make them difficult to read when compared to normal PCs. The volume on your Mac is encrypted before it ever reaches you. On many Macs, the flash is soldered directly onto the logic board. And some Macs use what's called a Fusion configuration where one volume is spread across two physical disks. Consumer software will stop reading as soon as it hits the first of these. Storage soldered directly onto the logic board (T2 and Apple silicon Macs, soldered laptop flash) is not taken on; if you're not sure which kind you have, call us first. Where the drive comes out, please get a quote first, by calling us or submitting our quote request form, then post the drive along with your password (for secure access to your files), insured and tracked, from Maidenhead or anywhere else to our laboratory in Guildford, or drop it off there (Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, no appointment needed), and we'll do everything else.
Describe the fault to an engineer
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| The symptom | The likely cause | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| Folder icon blinking with a question mark | The Mac has no idea where to boot from | Turn it off & test the disk |
| Crossed-out circle on the start-up screen | macOS is installed but will not load | Assume that there is either something wrong with the disk or its container |
| First Aid reports damage it cannot mend | APFS corruption Disk Utility can't fix | Never touch anything before taking an image of your disk |
| com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error -119930868 | The APFS volume will not mount | In most cases, using an image will recover it |
| Disk Utility can't repair this disk. Back up as many files as possible | There is nothing else for macOS to do | Just trust it and shut down |
| Ever since you did a macOS update, you can't boot | Damage to container or firmware above your intact data | Usually recoverable |
Nothing is chargeable until you say yes. Every item gets a case number of its own immediately upon receipt, an engineer determines what has failed, and you get a clear picture of which files have a real possibility of being recovered. The single quote that follows is fixed, written down and does not cost anything.
If FileVault is holding the lock on this data, then the underlying material is already encrypted; T2 and Apple silicon Macs, with their storage soldered onto the board, are not taken on. With the password provided, the recovery process moves forward just like any other would, starting with an image that was properly captured so as to allow decryption at a later time.
Drives that come out are imaged normally. Storage soldered onto the board (the T2 and Apple silicon Macs, soldered laptop flash) is not taken on, and nor is any component-level repair on a dead logic board; if you are unsure whether you have one of these kinds of machines, call us first.
One file on a Fusion Mac could have blocks on the SSD, and blocks on the hard drive. Both are imaged, the CoreStorage or APFS map of how they relate is reconstructed, and the files return to you complete rather than fragmented.
You don't get charged anything until you've confirmed and authorised that everything is fine after seeing the entire list of what was recovered. Any recovered items are returned via brand-new storage media and the postage costs for these are covered by us. We do not consider a project complete here until we receive confirmation that you have been able to successfully access and review every item you received back.
Plainly, on the numbers: Apple does not release any model-specific reliability information, and Apple-soldered Mac storage remains outside every publicly available failure study including Backblaze's. A website that lists a specific number for a "MacBook failure rate" has created it. There is no such number anywhere outside Apple.
A Fusion Drive uses an SSD paired with a hard disk. Here the hard disk was failing, and the entire logical volume was going down with it. We imaged both, recreated the mapping that relates both drives together, and got ten years' worth of a design studio's data back from a Mac that had been written off at the Apple Store.
Yes. On a Mac that has been encrypted using FileVault, either the login password or the recovery key will unlock the encrypted drive so you can view the contents. Without at least one of these keys, the encryption will remain intact and unbreakable, regardless of who performs the work (including our lab). T2 and Apple silicon Macs, with their storage soldered to the board, are not taken on.
Not necessarily, since both companies address completely different issues. Apple's repair service simply replaces the board that was faulty and gives you back a functioning computer. Whatever was on the previous board goes with the previous board. Where the drive comes out, the question of whether you can access what was stored is independent of this process. Storage units that are soldered directly to a motherboard (such as those found in T2 and Apple silicon Macs, or soldered laptop flash) are not taken on.
Because the "volume" you see in the Finder is a book-keeping layer on top of two separate physical drives (a modest SSD drive & a much slower mechanical one), blocks of a single file can be on either drive at some time, therefore, we get fragmented data from a single device; both are then imaged and the block map has to be built again.
No. Storage soldered directly to the motherboard (T2 and Apple silicon Macs, soldered laptop flash) is not taken on; nor will desoldering the chip allow us to read it separately. Call us first if you don't know what type you have.
Every additional power-up asks for even more of a drive that is already starting to fail. First open a case with us, and let the free diagnosis tell you how much remains.