Data recovery

What we recover from

• Failed mechanical drives. Spinning HDDs that no longer mount, clicking drives, drives that spin but aren’t recognised.
• Failed SSDs. Controller failures on internal SSDs in iMacs, Mac Minis, and older MacBooks. On Apple silicon Macs (M1/M2/M3/M4) the SSD is soldered to the logic board, which changes the approach.
• Liquid-damaged storage. Where the rest of the Mac is unrecoverable but the data on the drive itself is intact.
• Macs that won’t boot. If the drive is fine but the rest of the machine has failed (logic board, power), we can image the drive and recover files.
• Accidentally deleted files and emptied trash, where the underlying data hasn’t been overwritten yet.

What we do

1. Free initial assessment. We tell you the rough likelihood of recovery and the indicative cost before any chargeable work starts.
2. If you proceed, we image the drive bit-for-bit using forensic tools, working from the image so we never write to your original drive.
3. We recover files to your spec: everything we can, or specific folders you actually need.
4. You take away a fresh external drive (or your replacement Mac, set up with the recovered data) and we securely dispose of any temporary working copies.

How we quote

Data recovery pricing varies enormously by what’s wrong with the drive. A drive that mounts but has a corrupt filesystem is hours of work. A drive with physical damage that needs clean-room platter recovery is a different cost tier entirely. We do a free initial assessment to tell you which tier your job falls into, and you only commit to chargeable work once you’ve seen the quote. The most damaged drives go to a clean-room specialist partner whose costs we pass through transparently.

What we’re honest about

Some failures are unrecoverable. Drives that have suffered physical platter damage, or SSDs where the controller has fully failed and chip-off recovery isn’t viable, can’t always be brought back. We tell you before you commit any money beyond the free assessment. We don’t take on jobs we know are hopeless to bill you for trying.

Backup advice

If your data was important, it should have been backed up. We can set up Time Machine + a cloud backup (iCloud, Backblaze) as part of returning your recovered files, so you don’t have to do this again.