Data Recovery
Now that we knew Apple’s wipe process actually worked, at least for internal drives, it was time to try data recovery. Using Prosoft Engineering’s well established at home data recovery software Data Rescue 3, we began efforts to recover data from the “wiped” internal drives.
Using Data Rescue’s “Deep Scan,” we attempted to find our lost files on both internal drives. Keep in mind that the “Deep Scan” looks at every sector on the drive in its search for files, something that can take many hours depending on the size and speed of the drive. In our case, a Deep Scan of the 240 GB internal SSD took about three hours while the 1 TB HDD took over 12 hours to complete.
Unfortunately, due to technologies like TRIM, which overwrites unused blocks to improve future write performance, the data on the SSD, beyond a handful of system and cache files, was not recoverable. This is important to consider now that Apple is rapidly approaching a product line that uses flash memory exclusively.
