QuickFix recovered data when Apple couldn't!

Last week a client came to us in duress because he feared all his data was lost. The week before he went to the Apple store and they tried to help him. Apple deemed the drive dead and all data unrecoverable…

Unfortunately Apple doesn’t have Marty Straume on staff like QuickFix. Marty is a data recovery and forensics demi-god. No joke, the guy is scary, scary good.

Here are the case notes from the client file. Names were changed to protect the innocent :->

Mr. John Smith brought  a bare 500GB 2.5” SATA H/D in a static bag to the Charlottesville computer repair shop on 1/30/14. He said it came out of his crashed MacBook Pro. The intake notes indicate that the MacBook was serviced by Apple, that the H/D was removed, and that he was told that the data would not transfer. I’m interpreting this as Apple having told him that data could not be retrieved from his H/D. He wanted data recovery from Quick Fix. Whereas this was a pretty problematic H/D (I’ll skip for now the prior history of attempts to gain access), eventually, QF was able to recover data using Restorer Ultimate with the H/D internally mounted to HellBat’s mobo (Win8.1Pro64). From within the context of RU, the contents of two folders were retrieved: (i) the “original” root [Users] folder and (ii) a “folder” called [Lost files] that RU used as a bin in which to partition/”store” files that could not be recovered in association with the original folder/file organizational structure. A total of 611510 files, 92347 folders, 136GB was ultimately recovered and placed on a GPT/HFS+ 1TB external H/D for this customer.