Drives we recover
- Portable and desktop drives from LaCie, WD, Seagate, G-Technology, Toshiba and others
- External SSDs, including Samsung T-series and SanDisk Extreme
- Time Machine backup drives and Time Capsule disks
- Drives formatted APFS, Mac OS Extended (HFS+), exFAT or NTFS
- Encrypted drives, when you have the password
- Multi-disk RAID and NAS units from Synology, QNAP, Promise, G-Technology, LaCie and Drobo: see NAS and RAID recovery
Common faults
Clicking, beeping or no spin. Usually failed read heads or a stuck motor. These drives are opened in our clean room and the damaged parts replaced with matched donor parts so the disk can be imaged once.
Drive not showing in Finder. Often a failed USB circuit board in the case. The drive inside is frequently fine, and we can read it directly.
"The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer." The file system is damaged. Don't click Initialise; that erases the disk's index.
Dropped drive. Unplug it and don't keep trying it. Every attempt on a damaged head can scratch the platters.
Rebuilding Time Machine backups
Time Machine stores each backup as a set of snapshots. A raw file recovery tool will hand you thousands of loose files with no folder names. We rebuild the backup structure so you get your folders back as they were, from the latest backup we can recover.
Data destruction
Once you have your files, we can securely destroy the failed drive so nobody else can read it.