Data recovery woes on M1 MacBook Pro

Having downloaded and tested a few data recovery apps on my Intel Mac, both of which found loads of deleted files, I tried recovering some important files deleted in error from my friends M1 MacBook Pro. I spent hours trying 3 different apps, dropping full security, installing kernels for full access, deep scans etc, but no meaningful files could be found, and when I say none, not even a test .doc I created and deleted prior starting the search. Something is obviously wrong.

After digging deep I found this bad news.

No secret that all modern Macs run on faster SSD drives. This also means that TRIM is enabled by default. TRIM is a set of solid-state drive erasure optimization commands that immediately eradicates all traces of deleted data from SSD storage devices the moment the file deletion is executed.

Yes, you are reading it right, if you remove a file from your internal SSD drive on a Mac, the chances to recover it even with the top-class software like Disk Drill are not very high. However, our own and our users’ tests prove the success rate is actually higher than usually expected, especially if you act fast after identifying a data loss.

https://www.cleverfiles.com/help/disk-drill-native-m1-support.html

:-(