Mac data recovery.
The model year decides everything.

Intel machines without a T2 chip. The internal drive is a normal SSD or hard drive, usually removable, and unless FileVault was enabled the data on it is readable in any other machine.

These are ordinary recoveries. A 2012 MacBook Pro whose drive has failed is a standard job — pull the drive, image it, recover from the image. APFS and HFS+ both parse without difficulty.

If the Mac itself is dead but the drive is fine, that is an inconvenience rather than a data loss event. The drive comes out and reads elsewhere.

This is the most important thing to understand about modern Macs, and most owners learn it on the day it matters.

On any Mac with a T2 chip or Apple silicon, the storage is soldered to the logic board and encrypted at the hardware level by a key held in the Secure Enclave on that specific board. This happens whether or not you ever enabled FileVault.

If the problem is the screen, the keyboard, the battery, a port, or the power supply, you are fine. The board is alive, the data is reachable, and it usually recovers.

If the logic board itself has failed — liquid damage in the wrong place, a dead Secure Enclave, a failed SoC — the data is not recoverable. Not by me, not by Apple, not by a lab with a cleanroom. The flash chips still hold the bits, and the only thing that could turn them back into files is gone.

If the machine powers on at all, you are in a much better position than you think, and the right move is to act now rather than wait to see whether it gets worse.

Try Recovery Mode first — Command-R at startup on Intel, hold the power button on Apple silicon. If Recovery loads, the board and the storage are alive. That is good news.

Then use Target Disk Mode or Share Disk mode. On Intel, hold T at startup and the Mac appears as an external drive on another Mac. On Apple silicon, boot into Recovery and use Share Disk. If this works, copy your data off immediately.

On a machine that is intermittently failing, that window may not be open tomorrow.

Even on an older Mac with a removable drive, FileVault will stop a recovery without the password or recovery key. That is not a limitation of equipment — it is what encryption is for.

Before concluding anything, check every place the key might be: the iCloud account tied to the Mac if recovery was enabled there, a printout from initial setup filed away somewhere, a password manager, or estate paperwork if you are working through someone's machine.

With the key, this is a normal job. Without it, no lab can help, and an honest one will tell you that on day one rather than after taking your money.

The backup was supposed to be the insurance, and now it is the thing that failed.

Time Machine backups survive worse damage than people expect. Older HFS+ backups store your files as a normal folder tree, so even a badly damaged one usually yields recognisable folders full of real files. Newer APFS backups use snapshots. Network backups live inside a single sparsebundle, which is the most fragile arrangement but still a known format that can be assembled and read.

Two moves turn a recoverable backup into a lost one: letting macOS start a fresh backup when it announces it must, and letting Disk Utility repair the volume in place. Decline both.