Recovering data from 12in MacBook SSD

[Ant84]

So I rather stupidly wiped my MacBook and sold it a few months ago without saving a very important file to my cloud based backup storage (I was near certain I had).

Is there ANY software that would likely recover this after 4-5 months? Buyer has been very cooperative so far and I’ve offered him a reward greater than what he paid for the laptop if he can recover the file for me. That said, he seems to be hitting a dead end with it.

 

[RedvGreen]

With a solid-state drive you have all the cards stacked against you.

Firstly, due to you desiring deleted data, you will need to do a physical image - this is colloquially known as a 'bit by bit' copy, but is more modernly referred to as a 'bitstream mirror image'.

However, before you get carried away with finding a buddy who can perform this forensic task, the Apple SSDs vary - some are blade, some are soldered onto the logicboard, some of earlier ones are actually normal SSDs. So you would need to establish a suitable interface.

Lastly, as you have indicated it is around 4-5 months, SSDs employ garbage collection algorithms and wear-levelling which move data around, regardless of it being requested by the OS. This gradually removes deleted data traces as the data is cleared from the memory blocks entirely, unlike magnetic hard-disk drives where partial over-writes occur and they are left on the drive for potentially years.

I would therefore say that it would be very unlikely to remain, if your purchaser has used the laptop regularly.

Disclaimer, I do this for a living for military.

 

[Broken Hope]

If you had FileVault enabled then you have pretty much a zero chance of recovering it as the encryption keys would have been destroyed when you wiped it.

 

[ChrisD.]

Do you not have a Time Machine backup?