Devices · MacBooks & Macs
On a modern Mac the storage is encrypted from day one, often soldered straight onto the logic board, and split over two disks in a Fusion machine. Shop-bought software walks away at that point; a proper bench doesn't, and from Exeter ours is a parcel away. Bring the password and we'll manage the rest.
Talk it over with an engineer
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| What it says | What it usually means | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| A blinking folder with a question mark inside | No system the Mac can start from | Stop rebooting — test the disk |
| A struck-through circle at power-on | macOS is present but refuses to start | Damage to disk or container |
| First Aid hit damage it couldn't put right | Corruption in APFS beyond Disk Utility | An image first, decisions later |
| com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error -119930868 | Mounting the APFS volume fails | Read back from the clone |
| Your disk could not be repaired — back up as many files as possible | The system's last warning | Take it at its word — power off |
| Boot loop straight after updating macOS | Broken firmware or container; sound data underneath | Strong odds of recovery |
Your device is logged under its own case number the day it arrives. An engineer finds the fault, tells you plainly what stands a real chance of coming back, and writes you one fixed quote. Nothing is charged for that look, nothing obliges you, and paid work starts only when you say so.
Data on a Mac sits encrypted whether it's FileVault, T2 or Apple Silicon doing the locking. With your password in hand the job behaves like any other — first task, a careful image that will actually decrypt.
A removable drive gets imaged the ordinary way. Soldered NAND or a dead logic board sends the job to component level — the storage can still be read even when the Mac itself is beyond starting.
On a Fusion Mac a single file can straddle the SSD and the spinning disk. We image the pair, rebuild the CoreStorage or APFS map joining them, and hand back complete files rather than fragments.
Before any fee falls due you see a full listing of everything recovered and approve it. Your files travel back on brand-new media, return postage on us, and the case stays open until you've confirmed everything opens on your own machine.
Being honest about numbers: no per-model reliability data ever leaves Apple, and soldered Mac storage shows up in no public failure study — not even Backblaze's. Any site quoting a firm 'MacBook failure rate' invented it. The straight answer is that nobody outside Apple has one.
The hard-drive half of the Fusion pair was failing and pulling the volume down as it went. We imaged both halves, rebuilt the mapping across the pair, and a design studio took back ten years of client work — from a machine the Apple Store had already written off.
Yes — wherever FileVault, a T2 chip or Apple Silicon is involved, we need either the password or the recovery key. With neither in hand, Apple's encryption does just what it was built to do, and no lab on earth reads that data.
Apple repairs machines; board-level recovery isn't what they do. A Genius Bar 'unrecoverable' usually means the board gets replaced and your files stay on the old one. Different trade, different result.
That one volume is really two pieces of hardware: a small SSD paired with a spinning disk. Files can straddle the pair, so reading just one leaves fragments. We image both, then join them back together logically.
Yes — it's board-level work. With the password and an intact encryption chain, data on soldered chips does come back; what you can't do is desolder the chip and read it elsewhere.
Each power-up of a failing device takes more data with it. Open a case first — the look-over is free whichever way it goes.