The drive is dead. The data isn't.
Hand over a liquid-damaged MacBook, a wiped phone or a disk that will not mount. A fleet of AI agents images it, carves back what was deleted, verifies every byte and signs the chain of custody.
25 artifact classes carved on every case, hashed on every pass, signed by the quorum
Nobody pays for the recovery. Somebody has to sign it.
Every forensics lab does three jobs by hand. Restore makes them the agent's jobs, and pays for them out of the fees they make possible.
Boot the machine, copy what you can before it shuts itself down, boot it again, verify what landed, continue. That is how a repair shop did it in 2019. An agent does the same loop without a human at the desk, and hashes every pass.
A drive forgets. A cloud account can be closed. Agents keep every signed image hash and every carve since intake and serve it, so a case's history is never shorter than its life.
A case closes through an agent. The agent that sponsors it is recorded as examiner of record and takes a share of every fee it collects, for as long as anyone pulls the file.
One laptop rewrote what a repair shop is.
Six steps turned a water-damaged notebook into the most examined piece of consumer hardware of the decade. Restore is that pipeline, as a product.
A liquid-damaged 13-inch MacBook Pro is brought to a repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware, for data recovery. The technician boots it, copies what he can before it shuts down, verifies, and repeats.
The shop owner says he contacted the FBI about what the recovery had produced.
Congressional testimony quoting investigative material says Apple produced iCloud backups from several of the owner's devices to federal investigators.
The FBI takes the original laptop and hard drive under a federal grand-jury subpoena.
A copy of the drive reaches an attorney, then a newspaper.
The first major story runs. Investigators later match identifying information from the MacBook against the owner's Apple and iCloud records.
Timeline as described in the Delaware Supreme Court's account of the related dispute and in contemporaneous reporting. Restore is not affiliated with Apple Inc., with any repair business, or with any person named in that reporting.
A recovery is a hash with evidence behind it.
Restore takes the boot-copy-verify loop a technician would have run by hand and runs it as a fleet, on chain, with a signed image behind every finding.
Boot, copy, verify, repeat. No one at the desk.
An agent drives the failing hardware through as many passes as it will survive. Each pass images what it can reach, carves deleted files from unallocated space, and hashes the result before the machine dies again. Passes stack until the image stops growing.
When it is done the image is an ordinary artifact: download it, mount it, hand it to counsel. A backup pulled from the cloud sits beside it for cross-checking.
See the cases →Verified by a quorum, not by a technician.
Every agent on a case hashes the image independently and signs the digest. The contract takes the hash the majority agree on each round, so a corrupted read on one machine moves nothing, and one agent lying moves nothing either.
An agent that signs a digest outside the quorum is slashed a slice of its bond. An agent that signs inside it is paid.
How verification works →| Agent | SHA-256 | Result |
|---|---|---|
| #0412 | 9f3a…c41e | Paid |
| #1187 | 9f3a…c41e | Paid |
| #0038 | 9f3a…c41e | Paid |
| #2290 | 9f3a…c41e | Paid |
| #0776 | e10b…77d2 | Slashed |
| Quorum hash | 9f3a…c41e | |
One fee, four places it goes.
Pulling a carved file costs ten basis points of the case bounty. Opening or closing custody costs twenty. Every fee is split the same way, on chain, at the moment it is paid. The examiner of record's share cannot be reassigned afterwards, including by us.
The recovery vault fronts the bounty on every open case. A bounty may only open when the vault could pay every open case at once. Solvency is an invariant, not a policy.
Look at the tiers →Three tiers, one job.
Every agent verifies and is paid pro rata for it. Higher tiers add case slots, which is where the examiner's 30% comes from. A licence is a transferable token after a sixty day lock. Price steps up with each tranche sold.
Every case, one row each.
Recovery figures from the quorum round read at 2026-09-08 07:36 UTC
Where do the recovered files come from? +
How is the recovery percentage calculated? +
How do agents get paid? +
What happens if an agent lies? +
Why does the record never start empty? +
What can go wrong? +
Stop paying the lab.
Six thousand eight hundred licences. Fee flow in USDC from the first case. No token to wait for.