Data Recovery Australia

Data recovery is the most stressful repair we do because it isn't really about fixing a device — it's about getting back wedding photos, baby videos, business records, or years of work that someone thought was safe and suddenly isn't. We've handled hundreds of these and the honest news is most of them are recoverable. Some aren't, and we'll tell you straight when that's the case. Free assessment, exact quote after diagnosis, and on most jobs we work on a no-recovery-no-fee basis — if we can't get your data back, you don't pay for the recovery attempt.

First steps depend on how you lost the data

The right first action depends on the failure mode, because the risk is different in each case.

If the device got wet (phone, tablet, laptop, anything): the data on the storage chip is fine. What's happening is corrosion attacking the motherboard, and it's progressing minute by minute. Power the device off completely — long-press the power button, don't just put it to sleep — and bring it to us or post it to us as fast as you can. If you can't get it to us within a few hours, an isopropyl alcohol bath is the right first-aid step (there's a dedicated section on this below).

If you deleted files, formatted a drive, or your computer crashed and won't boot: stop using the device. The data itself isn't deleted when you delete a file — what gets removed is the index entry pointing to it, and the space is marked as available. The data stays in place until something new gets written over it. The risk isn't that the data is gone; it's that continued use of the drive could write something new in exactly the area where the recoverable data sits. Don't run recovery software you've downloaded, don't install anything, don't keep working. Shut the device down and call us.

If an external drive has stopped mounting, is clicking, or is reading errors: unplug it and put it aside. Don't keep trying to access it — every read attempt on a mechanically failing drive risks accelerating the failure. Bring it to us or post it to us in protective packaging.

About water-damaged devices — read this first

If your phone or laptop has been water- or liquid-damaged and you want your data back, that's what this page is about. We do data recovery on liquid-damaged devices, not full repair, and the distinction matters enough that we want to be upfront about it before you bring the device in.

What this means in practice: we'll do whatever board-level work is required to get the device powered up long enough to extract your data. That might be cleaning corrosion off the motherboard, isolating a short, replacing a single failed component, or microsoldering the storage chip off entirely. Whatever the data needs.

What we will not do is pretend the liquid-damaged device is restored to long-term reliable use. The honest reality is that once a device has been wet, its warranty from the manufacturer is gone — Apple, Samsung and Google all consider the device written off the moment the liquid contact indicators have triggered. More importantly, corrosion damage from a spill progresses for weeks and months after the visible liquid is gone. We can address what's failing today; we have no way to guarantee that components we didn't touch won't fail next week, next month, or in six months. We've seen liquid-damaged devices work fine for years after a recovery; we've seen others die again within a fortnight. There's no reliable way to predict which one yours will be.

So we don't classify the work we do on liquid-damaged devices as a repair. There's no warranty on the device itself afterwards because there's nothing honest we can warrant — we can't promise that a board that's been wet will still be functioning in three months. The economical advice almost every time is: let us recover your data, then move it to a working device. The cost difference between data recovery and replacement is small compared to the risk of staking your daily phone or laptop on an unpredictable liquid-damaged board. We'd rather tell you that upfront than have you come back angry six months later because the device died again.

One exception worth flagging: MacBooks. Because MacBook logic boards are physically larger than phone boards, the board-level work is less tedious and the economics genuinely support full repair. We do offer a board-level liquid-damage repair service on MacBooks specifically, with a 3-month workshop warranty against the work we performed — that's a different service to what's described on this page. If you'd rather restore the MacBook to ongoing use than recover-the-data-and-replace, see our MacBook Liquid Damage Repair article. For phones and tablets, the boards are too small and the work too tedious for that to make economic sense, which is why the data-recovery-and-replace approach is what we recommend.

The isopropyl alcohol bath — the one first-aid step that actually works

If you can't get a wet device to us within a couple of hours, the most useful thing you can do yourself is submerge it in high-concentration isopropyl alcohol (IPA, 90% or higher). This is genuinely the right first-aid step and it makes a real difference to whether the data is recoverable.

Here's why it works. The damage from a liquid spill isn't really from the water itself — it's from the conductive minerals in the water plus dissolved oxygen reacting with copper traces and component leads on the motherboard. As long as that conductive liquid sits on the board, even with the device powered off, corrosion progresses. IPA does two things: it displaces the water (IPA is hygroscopic — it absorbs water aggressively), and it evaporates cleanly leaving no conductive residue behind. Submerging the device in IPA dilutes the contaminating water out of every cavity inside the device and replaces it with something that won't damage the board.

The catch is that IPA also softens the lamination adhesives on phone screens and degrades the lens coatings on cameras. After an IPA bath, the screen will usually need replacement and the cameras might. Those are cosmetic, replaceable parts that cost a fraction of what data recovery from a corrosion-destroyed motherboard costs. We're optimising for the motherboard because that's the only part that holds your data.

How to do it properly: power the device off completely first — critical, because IPA is more conductive than dry air and a powered-on device will short components instantly. Use 90% or higher isopropyl alcohol (the cheaper 70% has too much water in it). Submerge the entire device in enough IPA to fully cover it, in a container you don't need afterwards. Leave for 20-30 minutes. Don't try to power it on yourself — bring it to us as it is, still wet with IPA if it hasn't fully evaporated. We'll take it from there. If you can get to us within the hour and the spill was small, you can skip the bath; getting power off and the device to us as fast as possible is always the priority.

What we recover from, by device type

Phones — iPhone, Android, Pixel, Samsung. Cracked screens with intact internals, phones that won't turn on after a drop or fault, factory resets where photos were on local storage rather than iCloud or Google Photos, accidentally deleted photos or messages. For water-damaged phones specifically (as covered in the section above), the goal is data extraction — we get the phone powered up long enough to pull your data off, and we recommend you replace the device afterwards rather than rely on a once-wet phone for daily use. On phones where the storage chip is soldered to the logic board (every modern iPhone, most modern Androids), we can perform chip-off recovery — microsolder the storage chip off the dead board and read it directly. Our dedicated article on how to recover data from a dead phone covers the specifics.

MacBooks and laptops. Dead SSDs, NVMe drives that won't mount, accidentally deleted files, failed macOS or Windows updates that have wiped a partition, encrypted drives where the password is known. For liquid-damaged MacBooks and laptops, the same principle applies as with phones — we do the minimum board-level work required to power the device long enough to extract the data, and we recommend replacement afterwards. On Apple Silicon MacBooks and post-2018 Intel MacBooks where the SSD is soldered to the logic board, we can also perform chip-off recovery — microsolder the storage chips off the board and read them via donor board or chip-reader rig, which doesn't require the laptop itself to be functional at all.

External hard drives. The classic "click of death" is usually a failed read/write head — we transfer the platters into a donor mechanism in a clean environment and recover the data from there. Hard drives that mount but read slowly or report errors are usually firmware corruption or surface damage, which we read around using specialised recovery hardware. Drives that aren't recognised at all are sometimes recoverable via direct controller-board work.

SSDs and NVMe drives. SSDs fail differently to mechanical drives. Most SSD failures are controller faults rather than the underlying NAND chips themselves dying, which means the data is often still readable if we can read the chips directly. The catch is that modern SSDs encrypt the data at rest with a controller-managed key, so chip-off SSD recovery is more involved than chip-off recovery from older NAND-only devices. We'll honestly assess your specific drive at the assessment stage.

USB drives, memory cards, camera storage. Cheaper NAND flash storage that fails by losing references to file structures rather than catastrophic chip failure. Generally high-success-rate recoveries because the underlying data is intact and we're just reading around the corruption. Memory cards from cameras and dashcams are common requests — usually fully recoverable.

Servers, NAS, and RAID arrays. Less common but we do handle them — failed RAID rebuilds, drives dropped out of arrays, NAS units that won't boot. RAID recovery is its own discipline and we'll be honest about whether a specific case is something we can do in-house or whether you'd be better off with a specialised RAID-only firm; this matters for time-critical business data.

How the assessment works

You bring or send us the device. We assess it for free — no commitment, no charge if you choose not to proceed. The assessment tells us three things: what failed, how recoverable the data realistically is, and what it would cost to attempt the recovery. We'll give you an exact quote and an honest read on success probability before you commit. On most jobs we work no-recovery-no-fee, so if we attempt the recovery and can't get anything back, you don't pay for the attempt (parts, shipping, and any deep-component work are quoted separately and discussed upfront where applicable).

The recovery itself takes anywhere from a few hours (simple file recovery from a working drive) to a few weeks (chip-off recovery requiring donor parts, multi-pass reading of a damaged hard drive). We'll give you a realistic timeline at quote stage. For time-sensitive jobs — legal deadlines, business continuity, weddings happening this weekend — tell us and we'll prioritise.

How we actually do it

Standard data recovery uses commercial recovery software running on a dedicated, write-blocked workstation that mounts the source drive read-only — meaning we can't accidentally write anything to the failing drive during the process. From there we image the entire drive sector-by-sector to a healthy working drive, and recovery proceeds from that image rather than the original. This protects what's left even if the source drive deteriorates during the work. If your drive is showing early warning signs but hasn't failed yet, the same symptoms often present as system slowness — our guide to why your laptop is slow covers the pre-failure diagnostic path.

For mechanical drives with physical damage, we open them in our clean-bench environment (not a Class 10 cleanroom, but sufficient for typical recovery work on consumer-grade drives), swap heads from a matched donor drive, and image from there. For SSDs and NAND-storage devices, we use commercial chip readers and JTAG-style tools to read NAND chips directly when the controller has failed. For modern phones and laptops with soldered storage, we perform microsoldering to remove the storage chip and mount it on a donor logic board or specialised reading rig.

USB data recovery on the iFix bench.

What we honestly can't do

A few situations where data isn't recoverable at our workshop or anywhere else, and we'll tell you upfront. Drives that have been zero-written (a full secure-erase pass, not just a quick format) overwrite the underlying data with zeros and there's nothing left to recover. Drives with strong encryption (FileVault, BitLocker, LUKS) where the password is genuinely forgotten — encryption works as designed and breaking it isn't possible at any consumer-grade shop or service. Cloud-only data with no local copy where you've lost access to the account behind 2FA — we can advise on the account recovery process but we can't bypass authentication. Drives that have suffered catastrophic physical damage to the storage media itself (fire, severe impact damage to the platters or NAND chips themselves) are sometimes unrecoverable; we'll know after the assessment.

Forensic and legal data recovery

We do data recovery work for solicitors, insurance assessors and private clients in legal matters where chain-of-custody and documentation are required. The technical work is the same as our standard recovery — same hardware, same software, same bench process — but the documentation is more rigorous. Photo evidence on arrival and during recovery, written reports on what was recovered and from which storage areas, signed chain-of-custody forms, and expert-witness statements where required. We've supported civil and commercial matters across Australia. Call us to discuss your specific scope.

Outside the Central Coast? Post it to us

We receive devices for data recovery by post regularly from Sydney, Newcastle, Wollongong, regional NSW and interstate. Call or message first so we can confirm scope and pricing range. Pack the device carefully (this matters more for data recovery than for repair work, because additional damage in transit can compromise recoverability). Ship tracked with full insurance for the device's replacement value. For external drives, we'd recommend wrapping in static-shielded packaging where you have it, then bubble-wrap inside a sturdy box. We complete assessment within 48 hours of arrival and call you with the quote and success-probability read before doing anything.

Common questions