① This week's tip
A MacBook with a T2 chip or Apple Silicon won't boot, and the customer's priority is the data. Before you quote any recovery work, try Revive in Apple Configurator 2 from a second Mac, with the dead one in DFU mode.
Revive reinstalls the firmware and recoveryOS and should leave the user data alone. Restore erases the disk, and it sits right next to Revive in the menu. Choose the wrong one and the data is gone, with your name on the job.
Read the option twice before you click.
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② Prompt of the week
Use this to build a data service sheet and consent paragraph, so recovery stops being a favour:
I run an independent Apple repair lab in Portugal. Build me a one-page data service sheet with two items: "Data Transfer" (device boots, fixed fee, scope and deletion policy) and "Data Recovery Attempt" (device doesn't boot, board-level attempt, result not guaranteed, quoted separately from any repair). Include a short consent paragraph the customer signs, covering authorisation to access the device, scope of the attempt, no guarantee of recovery, and deletion of any copies within [X] days. Plain English, under 250 words in total.
Fill in [X] and your prices, then put it next to the estimate pad.
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③ Resource this week
TestDisk: cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
Free, open source tool for recovering lost partitions and repairing damaged partition tables. Useful on external drives and older, non-encrypted disks. Don't count on it for modern internal storage on Apple hardware.
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That's it for this week.
If this was useful, forward it to a colleague who'd appreciate it.
— BenchNotes