Macbook Air SSD Data Recovery

I was told that my hard drive in the macbook air 13 inch (purchased in 2012) is broken with almost no possibility to recover the data, said both Apple Genius Bar and a guy from Electronic Market in Shanghai. The condition is, I have always been taking good care of the notebook, no water or drop ever happened to it. A week ago, it was working perfectly fine. Sat, i press the power button and it came out with a grey screen followed by question mark. Apple store claimed that the T&Cs clearly said hard drive rescue/data recovery is customers' responsibility. All they can do is to replace the HD and take back the old one. If I want to keep the old one, I need to pay 1100 USD. Now I need to find a way to get the data out of the drive, if possible at all, before they change the drive. I lost my backup hard disk already and if I can't recover the data here, I lose my life .... tears
please give me some hope by letting me know if anyone had similar problem and what are the solutions.... thanks so much!

Here's an article with suggestions:
Can Data Be Recovered From A Failed SSD?

Thank you

Thanks so much for the reply - I have a better idea of what I am dealing with. I guess I will just try one of the data recovery service and see how my luck goes

Here's an article with suggestions:

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Wow, great article LIAB! I was really surprised to read the part about Trim and how it makes it even more difficult to recover data from a failed drive. SSDs and flash drives may be fast but according to that article and research by Tom's Hardware, they're really not any more reliable than your standard spinning drive.

Cclaire said:

Thanks so much for the reply - I have a better idea of what I am dealing with. I guess I will just try one of the data recovery service and see how my luck goes

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Never mind your luck.... just make sure your credit card has lots of room on it for more charges. $$$

chscag said:

Wow, great article LIAB! I was really surprised to read the part about Trim and how it makes it even more difficult to recover data from a failed drive. SSDs and flash drives may be fast but according to that article and research by Tom's Hardware, they're really not any more reliable than your standard spinning drive.

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Yah, and of course the OP's experience here is a classic example of why everyone should have a robust and versatile backup plan in place at all times. I have a Time Machine backup on my Time Capsule; a bootable clone that is only plugged in when I am ready to do a periodical update; and my most important files and all photos are on my Copy.com cloud service, along with photos in particular 100% synced to my iPad. That's 4 copies of at least the irreplaceable stuff. I think eventually I'm going to go the route of a service like BackBlaze to have an online/offsite backup of everything. If my house went up in flames tomorrow, only the bare irreplaceables are on a cloud service right now.

@LB Online backup isn't a bad idea but look at the providers carefully--especially if you are going to back up system files.

I wrote an article for the blog a while back that looked at various backup methods. One of the things I found out is that some of the backup services can effectively back up system files for PCs but don't do as well for Macs.