The Seagate 1TB hard drive in my 10 year old Apple iMac crashed a few weeks ago. I brought it into a shop recommended by my local Apple store to make repairs. They replaced the hard drive with a solid-state unit but could not recover the data from my original hard drive. I was wondering if anyone knew of or used a service that could recover all of my old photos? My wife’s ready to have my ass so I’m desperate for help! Thanks to all.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: apf383,

Perhaps someone who advertises to do computer forensic work can help you. Google in your area for that.

I have had some forensic guys recover stuff from hard drives in cases of mine. There is no shortage of people offering such services.

A lot depends on the nature of the recovery needed.
Sometimes with some software you can dive a little deeper that the twits at Apple may be capable of.
The software can recover lost partitions, FAT errors, deleted files ~ all non hardware issues.
And sometimes when there are severe hardware failures you need to send it out to a service that basically dismantles the drive and reassembles it in a lab to recover.
The latter can get quite expensive.
I had to to this when a client failed to backup their mission critical files several years ago.

I used ONTRACK ~ they were good, expensive but it has be several years and since most all have learned the backup lesson.
I am sure there are others that do this but you may have to search around and compare services, times and prices.

Good Luck.

Thanks for the quick responses guys. Smschulz, thanks for the link, I just emailed them for a quote. Jhe, I may just go local as you suggested. I’ve got to look around here. Thanks guys.

Please budget in another $100 and buy an external drive to use as a backup.

quote:

Originally posted by Aeteocles:
Please budget in another $100 and buy an external drive to use as a backup.

And then remember to use it on a regular basis.

Or at least store your pictures in the cloud, using something like Google Drive, Amazon Photos, Flickr, or Imageshack.

Yup. Lesson learned. I’m a stupid, stupid man...

I went through this myself a couple years ago.... 2019 actually, I had to look lol.

I HIGHLY recommend Secure Data Recovery https://www.securedatarecovery.com/

I went through several "top" places that failed miserably. Secure Data had no issues with it.

Here is my thread on the whole bit of "fun". https://sigforum.com/eve/forums...050054854#6050054854

It ended up costing me $2300 but that was in part due to the large amount of data on the drive and to the multiple failed attempts from the other places.

I've referred several folks to Drive Savers with good results. None of the good ones are cheap.

Whatever you do, don't ask the FBI. They still can't find any incriminating evidence on Hunter Biden's laptop. But I'm sure they can plant something on Rudy G.

Defer to the other guys for recovery services. I had a comedy of stupidity strike my iMac Monday.

MacOS 11.3 update resulted in my home account running super slow with pinwheels most of the time. OK shit happens, restore from Time Machine backup on my Time Capsule. Except the backup was corrupted and the migration assistant could not restore from it. Luckily I checked that first from my MacBook.

Luckily, I created a new login account and it worked fine. Then I went back to the old account and moved anything important into the public folder to share it with the new account. The old account keep freezing and after a few reboots it would no longer function at all.

Then from the new account I found I could copy over the "locked" stuff from the old home directory to my new one with the admin password from the old account.

Long story short, my new account is almost rebuilt with my photos, movies, music, banking, and saved email. And I have a 2TB SSD external USB-C drive arriving Saturday.

Moral of the story - even when you have an automatic backup system, things can go very wrong when you don't expect it. From now on, before system updates, create and verify a new backup.

Also, last time I upgraded my iPhone, the backup I tried to restore from was corrupt and I already traded in my old phone. Took a "backup fixer" app to resurrect it and restore to the new phone. From now on I will keep the old phone until the new one is migrated. And to a fresh backup to restore to the new phone.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Lefty Sig,

Sorry cant help on the recovery aspect but an external (spinning disc>SSD for long term storage...but thats debatable-see article below) drive 2x the size of your internal HD drive running something like Carbon Copy Cloner every night to back up your internal HD.

Dropbox is a good cloud-based file storage system as well.


https://www.enterprisestoragef...-will-your-ssd-work/

quote:

Originally posted by RogueJSK:

quote:

Originally posted by Aeteocles:
Please budget in another $100 and buy an external drive to use as a backup.

And then remember to use it on a regular basis.

Or at least store your pictures in the cloud, using something like Google Drive, Amazon Photos, Flickr, or Imageshack.

Mrs. Mike just bought a terabyte external drive that I have labeled “go go backup” for just those kinds of situations. We haven’t lost anything yet, but it’s better to be safe. And the price of Carbonite went up. Now she just runs a copy onto Go-go backup once a week, and I Chuck it into the safe.

Just as a follow up. I just dropped the hard drive at PITS Global. They have a location about 20 minutes from my house. Hopefully they can get it done. I should know within a week or so. Fingers crossed, thanks to all as always.

I have long harped on the 3-2-1 backup strategy. 3 copies, two storage or media formats, 1 stored offsite.

In practice, that means either

a) a live copy of your data on your computer, a live copy on an external USB drive, and, a compressed archive copy stored online (Carbonite, Crashplan); or,

b) a live copy of your data on your computer, a compressed archive copy stored on a USB drive (Time Machine, Acronis TrueImage), and a live copy of your data on the Cloud (Google drive/One Drive).

Threats are ever evolving though, and these days I'm pushing a 3-2-1 plus 1 strategy. 3 copies of data, 2 storage format, 1 stored off site and at least one air-gap. Ransomware is getting sophisticated, and it will not be too long before we start seeing widespread encryption attacks on both live data and backup sets that are attached to the computer (both online and locally attached via USB or network).

In practice, this means either disconnecting your local copy from your machine after each backup, or as I do, using yet an additional hard drive to backup the backup periodically.

I've used Recuva and its worked decently well. WE had an external purely for family photos and that one died hard. I had to pay a recovery company to pull the pictures off. Not cheap.