MacBook Pro SSD Data Recovery Help!

jordan.dickinson

jordan.dickinson

Jordan Dickinson
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I had an older (2013) Macbook Pro 1TB SSD fail on me a few weeks ago. I'm kicking myself because I had thought about the need to do a backup and had a 2TB external SSD in the mail when this crash happened. That said, my MacBook is done, and I have now lost hundreds of photos that I'm very proud of and ultimately heartbroken about losing. I realize I'm an idiot for not backing these up better, and it's even worse that I received my external hard drive just a few days after this happened. In any event, I am trying to get some sourcing for a good data recovery service. I'm hoping someone has had a similar issue and had some success. At this point, I'm willing to spend extra money to have this data recovered, but really just want to find a company that can handle a very difficult recovery.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, and please keep the "you should have backed everything up" comments to a minimum. I'm very aware, and I know it's my fault for not being better about it, but I've never had a hard drive crash like this and was literally in the process of starting a full backup...just missed it by days.
 
slantface said:
I had an older (2013) Macbook Pro 1TB SSD fail on me a few weeks ago. I'm kicking myself because I had thought about the need to do a backup and had a 2TB external SSD in the mail when this crash happened. That said, my MacBook is done, and I have now lost hundreds of photos that I'm very proud of and ultimately heartbroken about losing. I realize I'm an idiot for not backing these up better, and it's even worse that I received my external hard drive just a few days after this happened. In any event, I am trying to get some sourcing for a good data recovery service. I'm hoping someone has had a similar issue and had some success. At this point, I'm willing to spend extra money to have this data recovered, but really just want to find a company that can handle a very difficult recovery.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, and please keep the "you should have backed everything up" comments to a minimum. I'm very aware, and I know it's my fault for not being better about it, but I've never had a hard drive crash like this and was literally in the process of starting a full backup...just missed it by days.
Click to expand...

Sorry this happened to you, Slantface. I’m curious to know if you have determined why your SSD drive failed. I’m asking because I recently bought a 1TB SSD for backing up my iTunes recordings, deciding to pay extra for an SSD drive so I wouldn’t have to worry about the possible failure of a mechanical rotating-disc drive. So you can see why I’m concerned over your experience with an SSD failing. If you have any thoughts on why this occurred, please do share them. Good luck with your recovery efforts.
 
Trask....I wish I knew what happened, but I was in the middle of editing some photos on my MacBook and had been doing so without issue for years. For some reason, Lightroom froze while exporting an image and after about 20 minutes, I decided it was likely best to power down and reboot the computer as I was unable to do anything else at that point. But, once I restarted the computer, it essentially wouldn't boot up any more. I tried a number of things I found online for fixing a MacBook startup issue, but nothing seemed to work. Eventually the computer would just make the startup chime, but no apple logo and no login screen. I took it to the Apple store, and they basically just tried the 3 or 4 things I had already attempted and then suggest that I just buy a new computer from them...which really didn't help anything and just made me more disappointed with Apple. In any event, I know my computer was old, and i should have backed up more regularly, but the computer was lightly used, and I still had like 500gb of storage available so I don't think it had anything to do with the SSD being at capacity. I thought an SSD was going to be safer than the old school optical drive, but now I'm just disappointed and upset at my faith in this. I have never had a drive fail me, so this is ultimately a life lesson learned the hard way. I still have hope and am going to send the SSD for possible data recovery...fingers crossed.
 
Here's one thing to try if you haven't done so already. You said you had a new SSD in the mail so you might try attaching the new drive as an external drive. Use a hard drive enclosure. Not very expensive. Start up the Mac with the new drive in USB or Lighting connection and use Command R to download a new Mac OS on line from Apple. Once downloaded use Disk Utility to format and partition the new drive. NOT THE OLD ONE. Select this new drive as your Start Up disk. If you are lucky, once your Mac boots up you will be able to see your original "Macintosh HD" and be able to download your old files. I had this work for me on an old hard drive. It was the first time I lost a drive and the last time I didn't do daily backups! If this does not work, and there are no guarantees, you can still install the new drive into your Mac and begin piecing what backups you do have back together.

Hope it helps!
Dave
 
Hi slantface,

Sorry to hear about your SSD. I used the same 2013 MBP for years (still have it). In many ways, it's a better machine than the 2020 BMP I replaced it with. Along the way, I experimented with a couple of OWC aftermarket SSDs. They'd sell you their SSD along with an enclosure allowing you to use your original Apple (internal) SSD as a USB drive.

I'm not using those enclosures now, and I'll be happy to send you one if you want to try mounting your corrupted drive externally. If you're interested, PM me your info.
 
Thank you! I will try this



halfaninchawater said:
Here's one thing to try if you haven't done so already. You said you had a new SSD in the mail so you might try attaching the new drive as an external drive. Use a hard drive enclosure. Not very expensive. Start up the Mac with the new drive in USB or Lighting connection and use Command R to download a new Mac OS on line from Apple. Once downloaded use Disk Utility to format and partition the new drive. NOT THE OLD ONE. Select this new drive as your Start Up disk. If you are lucky, once your Mac boots up you will be able to see your original "Macintosh HD" and be able to download your old files. I had this work for me on an old hard drive. It was the first time I lost a drive and the last time I didn't do daily backups! If this does not work, and there are no guarantees, you can still install the new drive into your Mac and begin piecing what backups you do have back together.

Hope it helps!
Dave
Click to expand...
 
Thanks very much. I have ordered one in an attempt to try some other options here, but I very much appreciate the offer and the suggestion. I've still been unsuccessful, but I'm not giving up yet!


Thanks everyone



andyturk said:
Hi slantface,

Sorry to hear about your SSD. I used the same 2013 MBP for years (still have it). In many ways, it's a better machine than the 2020 BMP I replaced it with. Along the way, I experimented with a couple of OWC aftermarket SSDs. They'd sell you their SSD along with an enclosure allowing you to use your original Apple (internal) SSD as a USB drive.

I'm not using those enclosures now, and I'll be happy to send you one if you want to try mounting your corrupted drive externally. If you're interested, PM me your info.
Click to expand...
 
Wow, I also have a 2013 Macbook Pro with SSD. This is reminding me to plug in the external drive so it can run Time Machine!
 
iirc Macs dont use normal m.2 ssd's, but Apple proprietary version of it. least this was the case in my 2010 Mac Air.

if its normal 2.5 sata ssd, then it should be doable to put it in enclosure and attach via usb.

halfaninchawater said:
Here's one thing to try if you haven't done so already. You said you had a new SSD in the mail so you might try attaching the new drive as an external drive. Use a hard drive enclosure. ...
Click to expand...
 
Can an external hard drive function in lieu of the internal one? So that if I wanted to have 1TB instead of, say, a built-in 256GB, it can be done by using an external drive that would work just as transparently as the on-board one?

I'm guessing that such is not the case, and that any external hard drive for my iMac or Macbook Pro would be just exactly what I already have: One external drive for Time Machine, and a second one I use for photo backup, if I remember to use it, but it doesn't serve the purpose of substituting for my internal drive, because I have to deliberately send to it any image I want it to store.
 
If I was in your shoes, I'd buy a replacement internal SSD then put the bad SSD in an enclosure and see if I could get the data off of it before I went through the expense of data recovery. You are going to have to replace the SSD anyway.

I don't know if this would work with SSDs, but I used to use Disk Warrior to fix hard drives. Might be worth looking into. Disk Warrior saved my bacon a few times. Sometimes drives can get corrupted.

And whatever you do, don't buy cheap SSDs.
 
I've had a Mac mini SSD fail on me previously, although I didn't have a lot of 'files' on the drive. However, the failure is likely localised to a segment that holds a critical part of the OS and why it appears to have failed. In my case, I replaced the drive and after reinstalling OS and software, connected the failed drive as an external drive. It wasn't 100% readable but most of the files I needed were still visible and could be pulled off. With so many files on your drive, it's probably worth trying.
 
Apple Genius appointment may be your best bet if you aren't pretty handy in the Apple OS.

If you are handy:
- Boot from an external drive, see what you can read on the internal drive. Hope it's just part of the internal drive that has the OS and you can see and read your files.
- Boot from an external drive, use a program to try to fix the internal drive.
- Boot from external drive, use a file recovery program. If the directory is corrupt, program may well be able to connect the data chains to give you a lot of files. You'll have the data (images) but problem is that all the directory information is gone (file name, date modified, etc.). You may still have the EXIF info which should be all you need for image files.

Good luck with all this.
 
My colleague who works with many computing systems, including different kinds of supercomputers, have me the following advice:
Use SSDs cautiously. They should be used for static things, such as programs and OS (yes, not fully static) and if used for dynamic stuff, such as datasets and images, those things should be backed up frequently. They should be backed up to rotating disk drives!
The reasons are: SSDs fail completely when they go. Rotating disk drives can still be accessed to some extent when they fail. Pro data recovery services have relied on this in the past. I hear rumours that some uncommon cases of SSD failure can still get some recovery, but my colleague is skeptical.

Bottom line. Use SSD in your machine because it is fast. Back up data (or images, etc.) often to external non-SSD drives for best protection. Now, many of us have external SSD drives nowadays. Keep in mind their shortcomings.
 
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