macOS hard drive recovery options

Yep, I think you pretty much nailed it right there...in answer to your questions, to the best of my knowledge..

1-yes they may be able to help...May....however, there will a charge for that...as to what it is and the level of succes, I can't say

2-yes, it needs to be configured, the only other option would be something like Time Machine, which needs to be turned on (it's not automatically on by default) and a hard drive of some kind connected, and a backup done regularly

3-don't know about One Drive

4-it may back up to the cloud but I'm not 100% sure on that, as far as I know it backs up to hard drive of some kind

5-it might be possible, but you'd have to have some application on your windows PC that can read and write to Mac formatted hard drives, and can recognize and run Mac dvd's. I don't know of anything that will do that...

You could advise your client/friend of the specialist data recovery service or maybe try Data Rescue 4. I had good results with Data Rescue 3, but again, that application isn't free, and it may work well, I hope, or not quite as well.

The data recovery serviice will work, yes, but it's not cheap, but it does work

maybe your client will learn a lesson from this and get a backup goiing and keep it going, as hard drives can and do fail

no matter what you have, PC or Mac...

JB

I am told the hard drive has crashed and the cannot access it. If they take the machine into an Apple Store with the Genius Bar - can they help?

Apple can replace the corrupted drive and give the old drive back to you in a bag. But they do not provide data recovery service.

Booting from a drive is much harder than extracting some files from it. See if you can put that drive in an external enclosure, or put that Mac into Target Disk Mode and access its individual files from another Mac.

Another approach is to buy a new drive and an External enclosure. Install MacOS anew on the External drive, then use its full power to attempt to rescue files from the corrupted drive. When you are satisfied with your progress, you can swap the new drive into the inside of the MacBook.

Can I recover an OSX drive with a PC or is that impossible?

If the drive does not Mount properly, you need to connect it to a Mac and use some specialty software. Look at a program called Data Rescue (which requires a different drive, on which to store the rescued files).

Trying to recover from a corrupted drive by Brute Force copying the drive is a complete waste of time. Over 350,000 files are MacOS, and that can be installed on a different drive in about an hour or two.

By default does MacOS backup files to iCloud automatically by default or does it need to be configured?

It needs to be configured, long before you have problems. It is really best for Sharing, not for backup.

I have read about time machine but it does not look like it backs up to the cloud?

It does not, but complete backup to the Cloud is COMPLETELY impractical. It could easily take three full days to do a full backup or a full restore, even if your Internet connection is quite fast. The cloud is NOT a good place for your backups for many reasons -- ask if you want more information.

Time Machine is a very good backup system for a lot of users, but it requires you spend some money (typically under US$100) to buy a large External Drive, preferably about 3x the size of what needs to be saved. A large "desktop" class drive is a good solution for many users, because larger and cheaper drives are available this way (rather than a smaller, portable drive where you pay for un-needed portability).

This drive need not be at all fast, because Time Machine works automatically at low priority in the background, so that it does not disturb your foreground work.

- OneDrive will only "backup" (really sync) what is in your OneDrive folder

- Some PC apps with try to recover data from a Mac Disk. One is SpinRite. It boots (PC only) from CD or USB and tries to recover data from bad sectors on the drive. It is independent of OS since it work on the disk level, not OS level.