External drives · erased volumes · ADR-2025-3674
One Prompt During Setup, and the Drive Was Empty.
Setting up a new Mac is a run of questions, and one of them was about backing up. She pressed yes to erase the data without realising
what the yes applied to, and the external drive she had been keeping everything on came back empty. Her instinct after that was sound: she haven't written over it since
. What happened next is where it grew complicated. Recovery applications of the sort that advertise for exactly this moment were downloaded and run, and between them they recovered some and most of the files now are not being possible to open
. The names that did come back arrived loose, outside the folders she had spent years arranging them into. She wrote to ask whether that was the answer or whether a better one existed.
Same story on yours? Tell us what it does — the look is free.
0203 0868633
What failed, and why.
Erasing a drive during a Mac's setup writes a new and empty description over the old one. It does not go round the disk removing what was there; the space is simply marked as available, and the contents sit where they were written until something fresh is put on top of them. That is why not writing to the drive afterwards is the one decision that really matters, and she made it. The applications are a separate question. A consumer recovery tool reads what it can, guesses at the rest, and writes out whatever it has assembled; where the guess is wrong, the file it produces has the right name, the right length and nothing usable in it. That output is not a measure of what the drive still holds. It is a measure of what a general-purpose tool could work out unaided, and the two are a long way apart. The drive she still had in her hand was the thing worth working on.
What the bench did with it.
The order of the job →| Equipment used | Its work on this job | The reason for it |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | The source drive copied once, in full, before anything else was asked of it | Heads mapped first, then one platter side to a pass, with every reset, every timeout and the power itself kept under our own control |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Condition established first, so the copy ran at a rate the drive could hold | Works with the drive's firmware and controller directly rather than around them |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | The erased Mac volume read out of the copy, with folder structure where it survived | Opens APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs when other software will not |
What the bench did with it.
Work the drive, not the app's output
The files the applications had produced were put aside at the start. They are a record of one attempt rather than a measure of what is available, and building on them would have carried every wrong guess forward. The drive itself was copied first, in one pass, and every question after that was put to the copy rather than to the drive.
Read what the erase left, not what it announced
An erase of that kind leaves two things behind it: the records describing where files were, in whatever state they survived, and the file contents themselves. Both were read off the copy — the records first, since they are what puts a photograph back under its own name and its own date, and the contents afterwards for anything those records no longer reached.
Structure is most of what a recovery is for
Handing back a folder of numbered files is not the same job as handing back an arrangement somebody built over years, and it was the arrangement she had asked about. Where the records held, files came back with their names, their dates and their folders. Where the records did not hold, the contents were recovered without them and kept apart, so that nothing arrived under a name that was not its own.
What went home.
What came back was a great deal more than the applications had managed, and most of it under the folder headings she had built. Everything was opened here before it travelled, because a file that will not open is precisely what she already had. The source drive was returned as it was found. The price came from the published bands at £300 + VAT for a single drive, agreed in writing ahead of any chargeable work.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Other desktop disks on the log.
Yours doing something similar? Power it down first.
Prices are published and fixed. Memory cards and USB sticks are priced at £250 + VAT. A drive on its own comes to £300 + VAT. Anything holding a second disk, whether RAID, NAS or a server, opens at £500 + VAT. The first look costs nothing, and the figure that follows is fixed and in writing before a penny is charged. Switch it off and post it in. Most jobs carry no fee where no files return.