Last week my team and I rescued data from a 2009 MacBook Air with a bad logic board. This was the first MacBook Air that had two kinds of hard drives. The more common drive was a 1.8” spinning mini hard drive, the same one that Apple used in the iPod Video and Classic. The less common variety was a proprietary SSD, like the one our customer from Pennsylvania had (pictured here). Her issue was that the 14-year MacBook Air logic board had a memory failure and would no longer boot up. Lucky for her, we had a working 2009 MacBook Air that we could plug her drive into and recover her data pretty quickly.
This type of data recovery is no longer possible on newer Macs as the hard drive is embedded into the logic board, so we can no longer pop the hard drive out. This is why a backup is more necessary with new Macs than ever. Apple’s Time Machine is free and part of the OS, and you can use any external hard drive. You should back up in more than one way now, so additionally, you should also use something cloud-based.
