Mac Recovery options

[crobertson]

Is there an exhaustive post for recovering from failed drives? I have everything for doing PCs and some of my customers now have Macs and I need to be more prepared. I have every windows version on a usb, but Macs have only reinstalled from the internet or local recovery.
Today, I have a bad drive and installed to an external SSD using the recovery utility. It copied over the files and programs after a bit of work.
From what I understand you don't have to have the keys to most Mac programs, but just log in with Apple ID and all is good. Is there other things I should know or handy tidbits someone has posted?

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

Apple ID is useful if you used that ID to buy applications from Apple Store.
If you use another ID like Microsoft ID to buy Office software, you still need to download and re-install it.

You can install Mac OS freshly by using USB installer.

 

[Fishrrman]

As time goes by and the entire Mac lineup is converted to m-series CPUs with SSDs and t2 (or t3, etc.) chips that "oversee everything"... "recovery" of data on failed hard drives is going to become essentially... impossible.

I believe that if the internal SSD has actually "failed" on an m-series Mac, that Mac becomes "unbootable", even from an external boot drive that would otherwise boot that particular Mac IF the internal drive was working. So there's no way to "get at" the data that's on the drive so long as it remains INSIDE the Mac, and of course there's no way to take it out and access it.

We're going to soon reach the point where ... if the internal drive fails... the only possible "recovery" for that individual Mac will be replacement of the motherboard (which includes the "unified" SSD/RAM/CPU, followed by a restoration of user data from a backup ... or from (perhaps?) the cloud.

So... within another year or two, the concept of "data recovery" from a failed Mac or internal Mac drive will become "something from the past".

If a user wants data that is easily "recoverable", it should be stored on an EXTERNAL drive, preferably one that remains formatted in HFS+. And have that backed up, as well.