r/DataRecoveryHelp

I'm planning on shipping my extra HD (clicking noise, not being recognized by any computer) to either one of these companies and trying to decide which one. Anyone have any real-life experience with either?

Hi any help would be greatly appreciated before I completely give up. And please don’t come after me about not backing up. The computer the drive was in was replaced in 2022. I have thankfully data prior to getting this but the data on here is important.

This is the message I received from the data recovery place-

We've finished the evaluation of your SSD, but I'm afraid the data isn't going to be recoverable in this case. All components on the circuit board tested as being good, with correct voltages on all lines and no hot spots visible under the Infra Red camera. The drive pulls amps but still failed to ID, which is typical of firmware failure. It appears that the firmware on this particular device is digitally signed (i.e., security locked) by the manufacturer, and there is no technology currently available that can recover the data.

Many SSD manufacturers want to protect their firmware from being reverse-engineered by other manufacturers (i.e., stolen), so they have developed ways to prevent access to it. Unfortunately, this is the very access that is needed for data recovery. Initially, manufacturers were blocking access to firmware via ATA, but data recovery developers were able to get around this by accessing the firmware via other methods. However, when manufacturers found out that access had been gained, they again locked down the firmware by creating a digital signature. Without this digital signature, access to the firmware to 'fix' it is not possible.

Thanks in advance

I made a shared album from my moms phone and shared it with me. I have shared loads of albums with no problems. So I deleted the photos from my moms library, knowing they would still be in the album as usual. Well, I couldn’t see the shared album on my phone, but I forgot to double check and some days ago I checked on my moms phone and there agent ang photos in the album. It has been more than 30 days so I can’t restore from the trash / recently deleted photos. Discovered that apparently there’s a switch for accepting or making shared albums that wasn’t on… The photos are very important so I’m panicking, have tried to log in to iCloud on my iPhone browser without any luck. Please someone say there’s a way to det them back😭

So the thing is I literally forgot my phone password. I tried remembering but I just couldn’t so I had to reset my phone. And all my photos and WhatsApp chats are gone. 😭 Maine backup hi nai kar waya yar uska. I’m so sad rn. I know there’s no chance but is there any way to get it back?

Hello everyone,MacBook Air 2022 (M2) had “Erase All Content and Settings” performed. Currently sitting at the Setup Assistant screen (boots fine, erase completed successfully). No iCloud backup, no Time Machine backup. FileVault status before the erase is unknown,does this matter if it was on or not?

As I know EACS performs a cryptographic erase destroys the encryption key in the Secure Enclave rather than overwriting data which theoretically makes recovery impossible regardless of software or even chip-off forensics, since the data remaining on the NAND is AES-256 ciphertext with no accessible key.

Has anyone in this community, or any professional lab ,ever successfully recovered user files after a completed EACS on a functioning (non-hardware-damaged) Apple Silicon Mac? Not asking about hardware-failure board-repair cases specifically asking about a working Mac where it sits on Hello screen. Genuinely trying to figure out if this is a dead end or if there’s a real exception I’m missing.

Hi so I woke up this morning to my phone not letting me put in my password it kept telling me it was the wrong password. Its a samsung s24 FE if that helps? anyways so i called samsung from my dads phone and they told me to facotry reset and that I would have a bakcup. but now I have lost 2 years worth of memories and all I want is those pictures back. please is there anything I can do

Salamo 3alaykom.

Is there any app that is

1. Free(important)

2.used to recover all deleted files (especially pics and vids)

I deleted some important files by accident.

Ty in advance.

I have an old iPhone 6 Plus that I haven’t used in years, and I’m trying to recover the photos and other data from it.

The phone still powers on, but the **screen/display is completely unusable**. My MacBook recognizes the iPhone when I connect it by USB — I even confirmed that the iPhone appears under the Mac’s USB System Report.

The problem is that my Mac is asking me to **“Trust iPhone”**, but the Trust button is greyed out because the iPhone needs me to confirm the Trust request on the phone. I can’t see or use the screen.

There’s another problem: **I don’t remember the iPhone’s passcode.**

I checked iCloud Photos and didn’t find what I was looking for, and I also couldn’t find an existing iPhone backup on my Mac.
I **do NOT want to erase, restore, or reset the iPhone** because the pictures are what I’m trying to recover.

Has anyone been in a similar situation with an old iPhone and successfully recovered their photos/data? Is there any way to access the phone with an adapter, external keyboard, temporary screen replacement, or professional data recovery **without knowing the passcode and without erasing the phone**?

I’m especially interested in hearing from anyone who has actually recovered their photos in a situation like this.

Local repair shop (excellent rep and reviews) says hard drive dead and data not recoverable. Are there other options? Prefer to recover a long document in Text Edit (which I'd only partially backed up). Model A 1466 EMC 2925. 14.85V 3.05A max.

Anyone sympathetic to a non-techie? I never expected a Mac to fail like this. What a lesson. Thanks for your expert insights and referrals.

Posting this as a last-ditch effort to recover my dissertation document. I’m an absolute idiot and didn’t back up the current version of my dissertation. I must have somehow deleted it, not noticed, and emptied the trash. The only version I’ve been able to recover is from mid 2025, which is SUPER old and missing everything I’ve written since then. I can't get it back from Word, and I’ve tried every recovery hack I could find on Google. I just used Disk Drill to recover absolutely everything possible from my laptop. It recovered old deleted papers from college 10 years ago, but for some god-forsaken reason, my dissertation is gone. I don’t have high hopes, but I just wanted to post this on the off chance that someone can produce a miracle. 

i backed up my iphone 13 to my macbook and reset the phone. when i went to restore the backup, instead of showing my recent backup (which i checked was there before i reset the phone) it said i had never backed up that phone, despite it showing the date of a previous backup in december. is there anything i can do to get that backup back? i updated my mac after backing up my phone and j think that’s why the backup disappeared but i have never lost or had any corrupted files after updating my macbook.

i factory reset my phone as i was having issues with storage and the functionality of the phone. it reached the point where all i could use was apple apps and i could still barely squeeze out 1GB of space. i’ve reset my phone before because of this issue, and it worked which is why i did it again. i’m desperate to have my data back because there were some pictures of my baby cousin i forgot to backup elsewhere as a just-in-case and messages from friends dear to me i read back. please help me if you can.

When reboot my phone I lose last added icons in folders. What the heck happen?

Hello I was in an accident on 8/13/2023 and have dash cam footage of the incident. I removed the sd card and found the correct footage on my computer but didn't save it correctly. I had put the sd card back into my dash cam and when I went to try and retrieve the footage it started on a whole new set of recordings. Is there any way I can get what I need for the lawyers back? Preferably cheap or no cost option. Thank you

I have multiple Google accounts signed into Photos that have their own collection of pictures and videos. A few months ago I had backed up the majority of my photos from my main account into an empty Google account to try and make space. Today I was clearing the excess of downloaded photos that I knew were taking up storage on my main, and then decided to do the same on the empty account to keep that one from filling up too fast. I clicked the "clean up space" button on that account not thinking anything of it, and it ended up clearing all but a couple images from my main account. Everything on my device is still saved to the other account so my important pictures and videos aren't entirely lost, but I can't access them on the main like before. I wanted to try using the "undo back-up" button to try and reverse this, but I've never used it before and don't want to screw things up further for myself. The initial "clean up space" button ended up wiping the majority of pictures from my internal storage for some reason (which is linked to my main), so I don't know if using the "undo back-up" would restore everything back to the internal storage? I also don't have a default gallery app (my phone didn't have one when I got it) so I think that just adds to the issue. If anyone could help me figure out how to reverse this, I would be forever grateful.

My motion photos are corrupted but have clear audio. It jumps around but there is no motion. I've converted it to a video file and it doesn't help. I've converted it to a gif and it doesn't help, i've used photo repair/video repair software and it doesn't help, is there any way to fix this. I have a motion photo that's 14 seconds long. Could all the data be stored in a single image?

I have a Samsung A53

I have an old iPhone 6 Plus that I haven’t used in years, and I’m trying to recover the photos and other data from it.

The phone still powers on, but the screen/display is completely unusable. My MacBook recognizes the iPhone when I connect it by USB — I even confirmed that the iPhone appears under the Mac’s USB System Report.

The problem is that my Mac is asking me to “Trust iPhone”, but the Trust button is greyed out because the iPhone needs me to confirm the Trust request on the phone. I can’t see or use the screen.

There’s another problem: I don’t remember the iPhone’s passcode.

I checked iCloud Photos and didn’t find what I was looking for, and I also couldn’t find an existing iPhone backup on my Mac.
I do NOT want to erase, restore, or reset the iPhone because the pictures are what I’m trying to recover.

Has anyone been in a similar situation with an old iPhone and successfully recovered their photos/data? Is there any way to access the phone with an adapter, external keyboard, temporary screen replacement, or professional data recovery without knowing the passcode and without erasing the phone?

I’m especially interested in hearing from anyone who has actually recovered their photos in a situation like this.