Data recovery; external bootable clone died during upgrade. How to recover?

[Simbad54]

Hello all.
I decided this weekend to try to roll back my MacBook Pro 2012 from Catalina to Mojave.
I have a bootable clone made with Super Duper.

I wiped my laptop's hd whilst booted from the clone but during the process the clone crashed and is now unreadable.

Disk Utility is telling me the clone is Uninitialized and it won't mount.
First aid doesn't work either, nor in recovery mode.

I am currently running the free version of Ease US and it correctly name the drive and all the data is there.
As far as I can tell, it's just the file system that got messed up, the drive is fine.

My question is: does anyone know how to repair this drive and get it bootable again or is that extremely unlikely?
I'd rather not pay a fortune to recover all my data and it's going to be a huge pain to get some of it all back in place.

If not, can someone recommend the best way to recover this data?

Thanks in advance!

 

[giffut]

Dont you have another backup? Dont ever do system wipes without a save backup/clone.

You could have a chance to use diskutility via the command line. It gives you the complete toolset to deal with partitions, disks and their failures. Apples own app "disk utility" is, quite frankly, a joke, as it only gives you incomplete information and remedies to deal with such problems.

But the command line this requires some skill and caution.

You can start here:

Disk Utility still can’t check and repair APFS volumes and containers

Don’t waste time trying to discover which files are still open when you want to check or repair an APFS disk and Disk Utility throws an error. Here’s the solution.

eclecticlight.co

But absolutely do implement and organzie your backups first and foremost.

 

[Fishrrman]

Before going further, please answer:

Is the 2012 MBP back up-and-running now?

If so, HOW did you get it back running (you said you had wiped it during the re-install)?

What version of the OS is currently running on it?

Were you by any chance using any kind of encryption on the backup?

Something to try:
a. power down, all the way off
b. DISCONNECT the cloned backup
c. power up and get to the finder
d. RE-CONNECT the cloned backup
e. Does it give you the "un-initialized" error? If so, eject it (for now).
f. HOWEVER -- if it doesn't, but still doesn't mount on the desktop, just let it "sit there" for a while. Give it, say, about 30 minutes.
REASON WHY:
Sometimes the finder can repair whatever it is that is blocking "mountability" (I would reckon this to be at the "disk driver level"). But it may take a while.

If it STILL won't mount, I suggest you try:
- Data Rescue
or
- Disk Drill
or
- another "data recovery" application.

These can be used to recover data from some damaged drives.

BE AWARE that data recovery can be more difficult with SSDs than it is with platter-based hard drives, particularly if encryption was used.

 

[Simbad54]

Hello all, apologies for the tardy response. Thank you very much for taking the time to reply.
I tried the command line attempts to fix the drive but to no avail. So, I paid Disk Drill and got the data of the drive.
In the end, it cost me money and time but I didn't lose anything, except a couple of emails...

But, after 22 years on a mac with no serious data loss this was the closest I came to a catastrophe (business accounts going back years).

So, lesson learned, and I need a more robust back system in place and certainly 2 backups if I ever do another up or down grade.

Thanks again!