Do not reinstall macOS or erase the disk to get the Mac going again. Both write over the files you want back. Shut it down, leave it off and, after a spill, keep the charger unplugged.
What is inside your Mac decides the job
Macs with a removable drive
Older MacBooks, iMacs and Mac minis hold a hard drive or SSD that can be taken out. We treat it like any other drive. Deleted files, formatting and corruption are recovered with software, and a drive with failed mechanics is opened in an ISO Class 5 (Class 100) clean room.
Fusion Drives
A Fusion Drive pairs a small SSD with a hard drive and presents them as a single volume. Your files are split across both, so we need both parts. Please do not replace or separate either one beforehand.
Macs with soldered storage
On Macs with the T2 chip or Apple silicon, the storage is soldered to the logic board and encrypted by that board. It cannot be moved to another machine and read. Recovery means getting the original board working long enough to copy your files, which makes it a Mac repair job as much as a recovery one. If FileVault is switched on, we will also need your password.
Time Machine, external drives and file systems
A backup disk that fails is still a data loss. We recover Time Machine drives and other external Mac drives, and we work with these file systems.
- APFS
- HFS, HFS+ and HFSX
- FAT16 and FAT32
- exFAT
- NTFS
How Macs lose data
Logical losses are the everyday ones: files deleted by mistake, a drive formatted in Disk Utility, a corrupt volume, a virus or a macOS failure. Physical losses come from liquid spills, drops and drives that have simply worn out. Tea and MacBook keyboards have a long and unhappy history. Whatever the cause, we recover documents, photos, videos, music and email, and what is on your Mac stays confidential.
Guide prices
| Job | Guide price |
|---|---|
| Initial consultation | Free |
| Logical recovery, standard hard drive, up to two hours’ work | £99 + VAT |
| Logical recovery needing 24 to 48 hours of work | £150 + VAT (1TB) to £250 + VAT (4TB) |
| Physical recovery on a single drive | £450 + VAT (labour, plus a donor drive if needed) |
| SSD recovery (firmware or electronic board repair) | £450 + VAT to £650 + VAT |
You get a firm quote before work starts, and there is no charge if we cannot recover the data. More detail is on the data recovery price list, and the SSD data recovery page explains why deleted files on an SSD need fast action.
Questions people ask
My Mac will not turn on. Are my files lost?
Not necessarily. A Mac that will not start often has a logic board or power fault while the storage is intact. On older Macs we can take the drive out and copy it. On newer ones the board has to be repaired first so the data can be read.
Can you recover a Mac with FileVault switched on?
Yes, provided you can give us the password or recovery key. FileVault encrypts everything on the disk, so without one of those the recovered data cannot be read by anyone, including us.
Will running First Aid in Disk Utility help?
On a healthy disk with a minor directory fault it can. On a failing disk it makes matters worse, because the repair writes to the drive. If the Mac is slow, noisy or reporting disk errors, switch it off instead.
How do I get my Mac to you?
Drop it in at 68A North End Road in West Kensington, or ask for a free collection and return from your home or office. The initial consultation costs nothing and you get a firm quote before any work begins.