Recommendations for finding Mac techs?

[fencepost]

An employee at a customer is having problems with what was described to me as a ~4 y.o. Macbook Air - starts, flashes, shuts down. Reportedly the drive was pretty full, and I can almost guarantee no backup. She wasn't even really aware that iCloud existed before I mentioned it.

The only things I've done with Macs since OS X came along involve understanding the basics of wifi and *nix-style networking, so I am not the right person to help with it. Should I just steer her to an Apple store, or are there likely techs out there who can help? I'm sure she's not swimming in money. No other Macs in her house, or I'd have suggested tethering it as an external drive (they can still do that right?) if that'd work for backing up her files before anything else.

If anyone here is in the far northern suburbs of Chicago (Waukegan/Gurnee/Libertyville) and deals with these I'd be happy to pass contact info along as well.

Edit: A quick bit of searching didn't turn up anything really promising - lots of cell phone repair, the typical scam stuff, and "Mac Lagan's Auto Repair" which didn't seem worth pursuing. Not sure if I should be steering her towards something closer to Chicago as her best bet.

 

[timeshifter]

She wasn't even really aware that iCloud existed before I mentioned it.

iCloud isn't really a solution to backup your computer. Time Machine is what you want. Plug an external drive into your Mac and it's almost like magic. One of the best features of the Mac platform. Time Capsule is the same thing, except it presents a network based drive.

If you have an up to date Mac with macOS Sierra you can turn on iCloud Drive and have the option to backup your Desktop and Documents folders. But this is recent.

A lot of people think that iCloud or "the cloud" is protecting them, when it's not.

About your customer:

I think you can open it up and pull the "drive". I believe it's an M.2 style or similar connector. You'd need an external case or adapter to connect it to USB. Of course it'd work best to connect to another Mac.

If it has Thunderbolt you may be able to use Target Disk Mode and connect to another Mac that way, but based on what you're describing I'm not confident that'll work. You could try it - hold down the letter T on the keyboard and turn it on. If you get a floating Thunderbolt logo you're in business.

 

[fencepost]

I wasn't suggesting iCloud as a backup (except for phones, which I believe can be set to do that) so much as additional storage so she wouldn't be filling the SSD to 100%. From what she said the laptop is current enough to be (or get) the current MacOS, so that Desktop and Documents backup may be an option for her.

As for the customer and laptop, nope nope nope, not touching it. This is one of the front desk people at one of my most distant clients - just their office is a 45 minute drive, and she's probably another 20 minutes past that, and basically the only residential I do is for family or a few physicians (who own practices we work for, and it's so they can work from home - networking issues, etc.). If Paco Lebron was still in Evanston I'd suggest that she check with him, but he's moved down into Chicago for everything.

 

[Markverhyden]

The Apple store will look at it. Give her a quote to repair if parts are available. Given the circumstances, especially no money, probably best to just pass her to the Apple store.

Basic trouble shooting, like flashing the PRAM, reseting SMC, booting into single user to run FSCK may yield some results. If you have another Mac what @timeshifter mentioned would be an easy way to get the data if it will boot into target disk mode.