Data Recovery Services

My brother recently had an external hard drive fail with over 40,000 photos on it he desperately needed to recover. He used Secure Data Recovery and they were able to recover all of them onto a new external hard drive my brother provided. It's not an inexpensive service, however...plan on over $1,000. I've heard of Drivesavers as well, and I suspect their prices are going to be roughly the same.

What OS were you booting when attempting to view the files on the SSD? If macOS 10.13+ has been installed on this SSD, then it will be using the new APFS file system which older versions of macOS cannot access. You should be able to see the physical SSD even when booted to an older OS, but you won't be able to mount any APFS volumes (may not even be able to see them).

If this is a third party SSD, then you definitely need to be booted from macOS 10.13+ since older versions of macOS are unable to communicate with third party NVMe SSDs.

What are the actual symptoms of this laptop's failure?

I know both Drive Savers and OnTrack both provide free estimates and both are recommended by Apple and other OEMs. Years ago my organization used Drive Savers a few times. We were happy with the results at the time. In fact one of the drives they could not recover any data so we were not charged anything....they had told me up front it was unlikely any data could be retrieved (I suspected that was the case before even contacting them).

I hope you will begin to have frequent and regular backups in the future to help minimize the chances of data loss. With the newer Macs, there are a lot more new ways to permanently lose access to your data due to the new hardware, software, and security features.

Good luck getting your data recovered.

Many professional data recovery services are regional. Some may support multiple regions. I don't know which regions any of them support.

Drive Savers is the most common one recommended by people and OEMs.

OnTrack is another that has been recommended by Apple & other OEMs as well, although I have seen some reports that OnTrack has sent some more severe & difficult devices to Drive Savers.

Years ago I saw an Apple document which mentioned a data recovery service for the Asian region, but I don't remember the vendor. I don't recall what the recommended vendor was for Europe. I do know there was only a few professional data recovery services Apple would allow when it was needed during an official Apple repair (most regions only had one vendor listed). Of course these are the big ones with large profiles. There are lots of other smaller vendors which may do a decent job for some situations, but quality can vary greatly so make sure to do your own research for any other vendors.

AleGallo93 wrote:

Hello, I need your help.

The internal ssd on my macbook pro early 2015 seems to have failed and is no longer recognized, unfortunately I don't have a backup of this drive.

I wish at all costs to recover the data inside it as it is important to me. Could you please recommend me the best data recovery companies globally?

Any suggestions will be helpful to me.

Thank you,

Alessandro

Did you pull the drive (PCIe/NVMe SSD) and try putting it into an external enclosure..? You can boot/ or mount it from there to test.

OWC/Macsales has enclosures and drives for your 2015

Is the SSD the original Apple SSD or a third party Samsung SSD with SSD adapter? Keep in mind, Apple uses Samsung branded SSDs with a proprietary Apple SSD connector.

If you are booting into a macOS 10.13+ installer and you do not see the physical SSD, then the SSD has failed. Within Disk Utility click "View" and select "Show All Devices" so that the physical SSD appears on the left pane of Disk Utility. If it is an original Apple SSD, then even macOS 10.11 & 10.12 should be able to see the physical Apple SSD on the left pane.

If the SSD has failed, then your only recourse will be to see if a professional data recovery service is able to recover any data. Unless there is liquid damage to the Logic Board, it is much more likely the SSD has failed since the SSD is usually the weakest link. An external enclosure will not do you any good. FYI, 99% of the SSD's I have seen which have failed, have failed due to the SSD's controller failing to communicate with the computer.

Hi,

You will need to contact the Apple Support for data recovery from a soldered SSD in MacBook Pro. An Apple store is the last hope if you want to recover data from a dead or water damaged MacBook.

Official Apple Support