Case Study: DriveSavers Recovers Critical Legal Data from a Formatted MacBook Pro Hard Drive

Alex’s MacBook Pro, which he had used extensively for business, held sensitive legal information, including iMessage conversations, email threads, and essential documents. After the hard drive was formatted twice, Alex was unable to retrieve the data using conventional methods or over-the-counter data recovery software. Because of the data’s importance in a legal matter, Alex required a professional and dependable solution for formatted hard drive recovery. He chose DriveSavers for their proven success in recovering data from similar situations, their five-star ratings on Yelp and Google, and their SOC 2 Type II certification for data security.

Recognizing the sensitive nature of Alex’s case, DriveSavers approached this formatted hard drive recovery with a highly tailored plan. To protect the existing data, they first created an image of the MacBook’s hard drive. Then, their skilled data recovery engineers meticulously scanned both active and deleted file sectors to locate crucial files.

A key challenge in this recovery was handling old iChat message files, encoded in a binary plist format. Though technically Apple-compatible, these files were unreadable without iChat on an older Mac and appeared as gibberish in standard text editors. To make the data accessible, Data Recovery Engineer Taylor used a script to convert the files into XML/ASCII format. However, the newly converted files displayed today’s date rather than their original timestamps. To solve this, Senior Engineer Will developed a specialized parser that preserved the original date metadata, making the files usable and correctly organized for Alex’s legal needs.