Apple/Mac data recovery software
Thread Starter
Apple/Mac data recovery software
After a few weeks of either rotten luck or universal bad humour, my data on a MacBook and a backup hard drive were wiped or not visible and despite around 25hrs with various Apple genius' it appears my only recourse is using a 3rd party proprietary data recovery software or firm. Would any of you Apple users be able to recommend any options ? Any help appreciated.
Note this is WINDOWS software but will recover MAC drives.
I had great success about 10 years ago with cnw recovery. It's $20 for a 30 day licence. You can download the software free and do a trial recovery, it will list all the files it can see but does not actually recover anything unless you pay.
https://www.cnwrecovery.com/ it's a UK company.
https://www.cnwrecovery.com/html/macintosh.html
You will need a drive to recover the files to. The software does not repair disks. If you think about it this is a disaster waiting to happen and is never appropriate.
I may just have been lucky. I pretty much knew what the problem was and I had high hope of success. I had bumped the drive when it was running and I used free tools to determine that it was likely that the Master File Table (or was it the MBR, I forget, it was 10 years ago) was not working. I was very careful to avoid writing to the disk thereafter, it was an external disk and not built in to a computer.
It is VERY important that the disk is not written to, if it is a computer System Disk (boot disk) I would take it out and put it in an external enclosure, or maybe at a pinch boot the computer from a different source. CNW state that the software will not attempt to recover a live system disk. e.g Windows boot disk.
Since you state that people have been working on it extensively, unless they took steps to avoid writing to the disk it may be beyond amateur (like me) help.
CNW used to do recovery themselves too, but I get the impression that the proprietor has retired and now only sells the software.
I had great success about 10 years ago with cnw recovery. It's $20 for a 30 day licence. You can download the software free and do a trial recovery, it will list all the files it can see but does not actually recover anything unless you pay.
https://www.cnwrecovery.com/ it's a UK company.
https://www.cnwrecovery.com/html/macintosh.html
You will need a drive to recover the files to. The software does not repair disks. If you think about it this is a disaster waiting to happen and is never appropriate.
I may just have been lucky. I pretty much knew what the problem was and I had high hope of success. I had bumped the drive when it was running and I used free tools to determine that it was likely that the Master File Table (or was it the MBR, I forget, it was 10 years ago) was not working. I was very careful to avoid writing to the disk thereafter, it was an external disk and not built in to a computer.
It is VERY important that the disk is not written to, if it is a computer System Disk (boot disk) I would take it out and put it in an external enclosure, or maybe at a pinch boot the computer from a different source. CNW state that the software will not attempt to recover a live system disk. e.g Windows boot disk.
Since you state that people have been working on it extensively, unless they took steps to avoid writing to the disk it may be beyond amateur (like me) help.
CNW used to do recovery themselves too, but I get the impression that the proprietor has retired and now only sells the software.
Last edited by jimjim1; 23rd Feb 2024 at 00:01.
SHJ,
My commiserations about your drive failure and potential data loss. I'v had three drive failures over forty years, two on Macs and one on a Windows machine. Luckily, I had relatively recent backups and the recovery was not too painful and I didn't lose too many files.
This would be a good place to start:
https://www.techradar.com/pro/mac-da...rvices-i-found
I would be interested to know what caused your HDD and your backup to both become corrupted.
Finally, once you are up and running again, there are these two complementary services:
Permanently online, automatic, cloud backup
Backblaze
Local bootable-clone backup
https://shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/...scription.html
I highly recommend both. They have saved me on several occasions.
My commiserations about your drive failure and potential data loss. I'v had three drive failures over forty years, two on Macs and one on a Windows machine. Luckily, I had relatively recent backups and the recovery was not too painful and I didn't lose too many files.
This would be a good place to start:
https://www.techradar.com/pro/mac-da...rvices-i-found
I would be interested to know what caused your HDD and your backup to both become corrupted.
Finally, once you are up and running again, there are these two complementary services:
Permanently online, automatic, cloud backup
Backblaze
Local bootable-clone backup
https://shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/...scription.html
I highly recommend both. They have saved me on several occasions.
Last edited by Saab Dastard; 28th Feb 2024 at 14:37. Reason: Backblaze link corrected
Thread Starter
Thanks for all replies.
Mr I42, I'm somewhat conservative when it comes to electronics, don't do anything out of the ordinary and make backups every week. The Apple system is perfect for such individuals like myself, it just works. Until it doesn't!
So, I needed to have a tech repair done on my iPhone and backed it up to my MacBook and thence to an external HD on Time Machine, as I do weekly. When the phone was returned, I hooked it up to the MacBook to upload my iPhone backup. Despite being visible in the storage, on Finder there was no backup.....So started my odyssey. The myriad of Genius' at two different stores, were bamboozled and despite resetting both phone and laptop many times, we got no further. Each time the Time Machine backups were used to reanimate the laptop, but no joy in getting the iPhone backup returned to my iPhone. This meant no numbers, no access to apps, no nothing.....On one of the last sessions with a Genius the external HD containing the several years of Time Machine backups was seemingly wiped, save for one from 9months ago. I was SO upset it was all I could do not to cry. A senior Genius managed to get me up and running with a 9mth old back up and 10% data iPhone.
There then followed maybe 10 more hours of phone based tech help which was escalated to up to Tier 2 Technicians and thence to programmers in Cupertino. Both my personal case Tech and I were optimistic about there being a patch or fix for the iPhone storage on the MacBook to be available to download to the iPhone. Alas, this was not possible as Apple don't offer this service due to their privacy policy. The MacBook stored iPhone files are corrupted and need to be fixed and the external HD with the missing Time Machine backups are also only recoverable by external software......I had thought that having 3 copies of my iPhone data was enough, that 2 copies of my MacBook data was enough, but alas it was not.
I have recently used the Apple iCloud service to back up my devices and any hesitations I had were overridden by my situation these last weeks. I'm leaning towards using the OnTrack recovery software as they claim it can repair corrupted files(mine were likely due to a power interruption) and also find and reanimate 'lost' files on external HD's. I'm hoping to do this in the next week or two when I have some quiet time. Hopefully my story is understandable and might well encourage anyone who doesn't have 3 distinct backups to reconsider.
Mr I42, I'm somewhat conservative when it comes to electronics, don't do anything out of the ordinary and make backups every week. The Apple system is perfect for such individuals like myself, it just works. Until it doesn't!
So, I needed to have a tech repair done on my iPhone and backed it up to my MacBook and thence to an external HD on Time Machine, as I do weekly. When the phone was returned, I hooked it up to the MacBook to upload my iPhone backup. Despite being visible in the storage, on Finder there was no backup.....So started my odyssey. The myriad of Genius' at two different stores, were bamboozled and despite resetting both phone and laptop many times, we got no further. Each time the Time Machine backups were used to reanimate the laptop, but no joy in getting the iPhone backup returned to my iPhone. This meant no numbers, no access to apps, no nothing.....On one of the last sessions with a Genius the external HD containing the several years of Time Machine backups was seemingly wiped, save for one from 9months ago. I was SO upset it was all I could do not to cry. A senior Genius managed to get me up and running with a 9mth old back up and 10% data iPhone.
There then followed maybe 10 more hours of phone based tech help which was escalated to up to Tier 2 Technicians and thence to programmers in Cupertino. Both my personal case Tech and I were optimistic about there being a patch or fix for the iPhone storage on the MacBook to be available to download to the iPhone. Alas, this was not possible as Apple don't offer this service due to their privacy policy. The MacBook stored iPhone files are corrupted and need to be fixed and the external HD with the missing Time Machine backups are also only recoverable by external software......I had thought that having 3 copies of my iPhone data was enough, that 2 copies of my MacBook data was enough, but alas it was not.
I have recently used the Apple iCloud service to back up my devices and any hesitations I had were overridden by my situation these last weeks. I'm leaning towards using the OnTrack recovery software as they claim it can repair corrupted files(mine were likely due to a power interruption) and also find and reanimate 'lost' files on external HD's. I'm hoping to do this in the next week or two when I have some quiet time. Hopefully my story is understandable and might well encourage anyone who doesn't have 3 distinct backups to reconsider.
SHJ,
Thanks for your detailed response. A very sad and unwelcome story.
I've been a Mac user since the days of System 6 (1988) and I use only Apple hardware for my personal computing needs - a MacBook Pro, two iPhones, an iPad and an Apple Watch. I use both Linux and Windows (reluctantly) for work but that's a different story.
One observation I will make related to your experiences is that I have found that Time Machine doesn't live up to its hype. It is promoted by Apple as a painless panacea, but I've found it very unreliable and buggy, and I gave up trying to use it several years ago. I now use non-Apple backup software as I related in my previous post.
Thanks for your detailed response. A very sad and unwelcome story.
I've been a Mac user since the days of System 6 (1988) and I use only Apple hardware for my personal computing needs - a MacBook Pro, two iPhones, an iPad and an Apple Watch. I use both Linux and Windows (reluctantly) for work but that's a different story.
One observation I will make related to your experiences is that I have found that Time Machine doesn't live up to its hype. It is promoted by Apple as a painless panacea, but I've found it very unreliable and buggy, and I gave up trying to use it several years ago. I now use non-Apple backup software as I related in my previous post.
Whenever I have to recover from a backup, I first copy the backup and use that for the recovery. That way if I lunch something I can go back to the original backup and start again.
Thread Starter
JJ, yes good advice, perhaps we shouyld all have a double copy of the backup on a disk as well as the device(s) and cloud. My experience has cratered my confidence levels in backups being solid tbh, though I'm sure that with time I'll be back up to my former naive worry free state ;-)
Last edited by Saab Dastard; 28th Feb 2024 at 14:36. Reason: Backblaze link corrected
