A MacBook rarely makes a fuss about dying: it declines the charger, or sleeps and doesn't wake, or shows a question-mark folder to a full café. Provided the storage in yours is the removable kind — SATA drives in the older machines, Apple's blade SSDs through 2013–2017 — the files have very probably ridden it out, spilled flat white included.
Every apple macbook job is diagnosed free. The quote turns up fixed, in writing, before a screwdriver is lifted.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
First job on any apple macbook is putting the symptoms against the fault — after twenty-odd years, these twenty-five account for nearly everything that comes through the door.
Whatever the liquid, it races through the logic board while the storage sits higher and drier. Board and data have separate fates — ours is the data.
Board gone, data not. It waits on the removable drive or blade, and extraction beats board repair for speed and certainty both.
Internal storage failed or lost its OS. Imaging comes first and theorising second; that ordering is house law.
Died mid-install, now looping. The documents sit out the whole pantomime untouched on the module.
Those machines carry ordinary spinning disks, so ordinary head failures follow — hood cases with well-known endings.
Blade modules go the way of all flash: suddenly. Ours image on native adapters with no donor Mac in the room.
Disk Utility took the volume at its word. Carving retrieves it while the freed blocks stay idle — keep the lid shut.
With password or recovery key supplied, encrypted volumes recover as standard work. Locate one before you ring.
Both persist until their blocks get recycled. Retire the machine today and tomorrow still holds most of it.
Flexgate-era panels imprison good files behind dark glass. Springing them is the entire brief, and a short one.
Occasionally an SSUBX or SSPOLARIS drops its mapping and exits the bus. Service-mode ground, thoroughly walked.
2009–2012 machines wear through their internal SATA cable and stage a persuasive drive death. The disk images perfectly once freed.
Swelling cells bow the chassis and load the board; the storage unplugs unharmed. Cease charging immediately — today, not Friday.
A spill's favourite entrance, shorting the lower board while storage upstairs stays dry. We have watched this film hundreds of times.
Blades written off by other benches get a genuine re-run on different adapters here. Sometimes that re-run is the whole recovery.
Dashboard heat ages blade and battery in tandem, with the read errors filing in weeks after the sunshine.
The signature of flash failing by degrees. It gets imaged before the degrees reach zero.
Erased for sale, backup never checked. Carving the old volume returns whatever the erase never physically overwrote.
A dozing pre-2012 machine still has platters turning; one dropped rucksack costs it heads. Donors reopen the conversation.
Closed-lid crush cracks the board at its slimmest section; the module shrugs. Module out, module imaged, matter closed.
The £9 knockoff with voltage opinions retires the board in an evening. Storage rarely notices — out and onward.
Aftermarket M.2-in-a-sled kits arrive with their own firmware moods and failure habits. Imaged natively whatever the sticker says.
Enough long-presses eventually shred the APFS container metadata. Rebuilt from a complete image of the module.
That infamous dGPU death takes the picture and the boot — never the disk. Send the drive on its own and it images like any other.
The firmware padlock bricks the machine politely. Pre-T2, the storage is indifferent: removed, imaged, recovered.
The storage decides it, not the year on the receipt. Machines up to 2012 carry an ordinary 2.5-inch SATA drive — bread-and-butter Mac work. The 2013–2017 machines carry Apple's slide-out blade SSD, equally routine once the right adapter is on the bench. Both kinds unplug, image and come back. Then 2018 arrives: T2, later Apple Silicon, the SSD now soldered into the logic board with hardware encryption around it — once a board of that era fails, its data is beyond lifting, by us or by anyone honest, and roughly two years ago we stopped taking those jobs because the win rate no longer justified the fee. Unsure of your year? The model number is printed on the underside, or ring and we'll pin it down in a minute.
Liquid heads for the logic board first, and the board soaks up the damage the storage would otherwise take. Out of a removable-storage machine, the drive or blade tends to image without complaint once it's been cleaned and treated. The cases that go wrong are lost to optimism, not chemistry: a charger plugged in 'to test it', a week in a rice bag, the airing cupboard. Power off, unplug, move quickly — do those three and you've won most of the battle already.
The whole art with MacBooks is getting the module onto a rig fast, natively, and without adventures en route:
Every gumstick and 12+16-pin variant connects natively for imaging. No cannibalised MacBook plays host at any stage.
Spinning drives from the pre-2012 machines receive the full classical treatment, donor heads and all.
Spill-struck blades and connectors are cleaned, neutralised and dried until they read steadily enough to image.
Both file systems parsed natively; snapshots retrieved; FileVault opened with the credentials you supply.
Lost volumes, snapshots and files return by carving while their freed blocks remain unclaimed.
Modules declared dead elsewhere get a fresh attempt on different hardware — occasionally that alone closes the case.
Draw the line at 2018. On the near side, drives and blades unplug and this workshop recovers them daily; on the far side, T2 and Apple Silicon fuse encrypted storage into the board, where honest promises don't survive. Spill survivors, frayed-cable impostors, blades that forgot their own names — all conclude identically: module out, module imaged, files home.
Nearly every job on our bench arrived by tracked, insured post — it's the quickest, safest route in. There's no collection service, so the parcel is yours to send or hand in.
Is the drive still inside a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Take the hard drive or SSD out first and post the bare drive on its own — removing drives from machines isn't a service we offer. Storage that's soldered to a motherboard (Apple Silicon Macs, certain slim laptops) is the one thing we can't work on: if it doesn't come out, it can't come in.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Address the parcel for the attention of Leeds Data Recovery — about 40 minutes from York via the A64 and A1(M), or next working day by tracked post. You'll hear from us the moment it's booked onto the bench.
Not certain what to pack? Ring 0800 689 0668 first, or run the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnosis, a fixed written figure, no fix no fee on most work — start online or ring the freephone.