What the customer needed
The instruction was to recover the contents of a 2013 MacBook Air. The job ultimately produced 271 GB, making the choice of destination media part of the recovery process rather than an afterthought.
A second access problem
The customer had supplied an external drive for the recovered copy, but the password provided for that disk did not unlock it. Writing recovered data to an inaccessible or uncertain destination would have created a new problem at the final stage.
Instead of altering or erasing the customer’s external disk, a new drive was purchased for £32. That kept the original return medium untouched and provided known, usable storage for the recovered set.
The recovery path
The MacBook data was recovered and 271 GB was copied to the new external drive. The complete job took around two weeks. The archived record gives a total price of £169; it is a historical figure for this specific instruction, not a current Mac recovery quotation.
The result
The data recovery completed successfully, and the customer received the recovered material on media that could be accessed normally. The case also closed the loop between extracting data and delivering it in a form the customer could actually use.
What this case teaches
Bring a sufficiently large return drive if you already own one, but make sure it opens and that its password is known before handing it over. A laboratory should not erase an inaccessible destination drive merely to create space. The source, the recovered copy and the return media are three separate parts of a controlled recovery.