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I had a 2010 MacBook Pro which had been updated with an SSD a couple of years ago. A couple of months ago the battery gave up and expanded with such force that it burst the aluminium case open. I did not try to start it up after this but removed the SSD and disposed of the computer.
I no longer have a Mac having replaced it with a cheap Windows laptop.
Does anyone know of a reliable recovery service?
I’m assuming at this point that the SSD is not damaged. I also have a portable drive with the Time Machine backups on it.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Assuming the SSD isn’t encrypted using FileVault, there’s no reason why you couldn’t just plug it in to another computer using a SATA to USB adapter and copy the files off. If you were using Apple Photos or iPhoto, the files are just held in the normal file system.
If you have a Time Machine back-up they will be on there. Just plug into another Mac and navigate the folders to find them.
Do you know anyone with a Mac? Get a sata to usb adapter, plug your drive into their Mac and away you go. You can even boot their Mac from your drive if it makes things easier.
You should be able to use a file reader on Windows if you don't have access to a Mac.
If it's more recent it will be APFS file system, but I'm not sure if there's any decent free reader software.
Older ones use HFS+ which there used to be a few good free readers for.
I've done this before for photos & vids.
Thanks all for your advice, I will ask around to see if anyone has a Mac that they could let me connect the drive to. I will report back later...
The only thing about plugging it into a Mac, is a Mac might try and respect the file permissions on the drive. Plugging into a Windows machine its unlikely to. And, yes, I forgot you might need some software for Windows to understand the file system, but that’s easily available.