Did i lose my data?

[mvtm]

Hi Guys,

About a month ago my 2012 11” MBA SSD failed. I don’t know what happened as i got up the desk, returned and my computer had a blueish/white screen.

The MBA had it’s lid opened, was not doing anything. I just only have about 2 or 3 chormetabs opened and no intensive programs running. It just suddenly failed.

This is not the first time something like this happens to me. Previously this MBA had a failure on it’s Toshiba drive in 2013, so the replacement OWC Aura Pro was going strong from 2013 to 2017, and as you know the rest of the story so it failed too.

I used my machine plenty a lot, it might be possible that the OWC completed it’s read/write cycles. Had 2100 battery cycles.

So when i turn the power key of course i saw the Mac/white-blueish folder with a “?” screen. I tried, and Apple Support tried to revive my machine by going to internet recovery mode and disk utility.

Even then my 128GB Aura was reading like having a 1GB total space drive! Anyways, i bought a 850 EVO which i believe it is the best SSD that my 2012 can admit. Is this right btw?

My question is... how do i know if my data on the OWC is completely fried?? Is there anyway for me to recover it? As i used my machine for leasure i didn’t have any backups at the time. At least for documents. I do backup my family photos and certain important files on an external drive. BUT the big chunk of it.. from 2013 to 2017 is lost. Is there anyway for me to check/verify if i can rescue the data?

I can post some photos about First Aid disk utility results later.

Thanks a lot.

 

[macsforever]

Unless you had a Time
Machine backup or another type of backup software to create a backup image you’re most likely going to have to pull the files over from the old to the new... maybe you’ll be able to see the files even though the EFI partition is fried... just because it won’t find the startup partition doesn’t mean you cant access the file structure itself.

 

[NoBoMac]

In recovery mode with Disk Utility, if the drive is not mounted, can try to mount it. Once mounted, can open Terminal and then: cd /Users/youridnamehere

Then can see if you see anything. If there is some recoverable data, can mount an external drive and start trying to copy files over (Unix cp command; Google "man cp" to get command options).

But guessing the drive is fried. Seem to see various threads out there reporting these Aura drives run hot.

And probably want to follow 3-2-1 like backups going forward.

https://lifehacker.com/5961216/why-you-should-have-more-than-one-backup

 

[macsforever]

Watch those terminal commands... you could hose it up worse if you don’t type the commands right!

 

[Shirasaki]

Another option is to seek local data recovery companies to help if the data is critical and cannot be lost. The price range could be from a few hundred dollars to thousands of dollars. However, SSD data recovery relies more luck than HDD.

 

[ZapNZs]

How important is recovery of the files? IMO, the importance should be determined before trying anything else at all given some of the actions you take can make recovery more complex.

If professional data recovery is not something you wish to pursue, the first thing you can try is booting into either a Mac or Linux OS from an external hard drive or flash drive. Once this OS is booted, it will verify that this is not some other problem that does not pertain to the SSD. Then, you can check the SMART status of the drive to see if it can be read at all. This will give you some idea of what you are dealing with hopefully. From there, you can attempt to manually copy files from the local SSD to the external with the OS...there are some programs that can, to a limited extent, recover files from drives that are in the process of failing (however, success is limited, sporadic, and it is impossible to say how well this will work in your case.)