I mistakenly erased the SSD hard drive on my 2015 MacBook Air. I spoke to Apple Support, and the gentleman told me the data is most likely lost and provided me the name of a local computer shop for repairs. I can easily remove the SSD. Since my Mac doesn’t detect the internal hard drive now, how can I get back the data?
Like the Apple Support staff said, the data likely can’t be recovered.
If you erased an HDD, the files are still untouched until they are overwritten. But yours is an SSD, where data is almost immediately removed from the drive after deletion.
When you delete a file from an SSD, the OS will mark the space occupied by that file as available for new data. The OS will also immediately issue the TRIM command to the SSD to inform it that the space is no longer needed and can be erased.
Upon receiving the TRIM command, the SSD’s firmware will mark the specified blocks as invalid and incorporate them into the garbage collection process.
Once the garbage collection is finished, the deleted files are forever gone.
If you want to check if the data is recoverable, you can remove it from your Mac and place it into an external enclosure, which allows you to connect it to another Mac for access.
Then download iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac on this Mac to scan your SSD.
If it can’t find the deleted files, they are permanently gone.