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How to Recover Deleted Files on Mac with Ease

It does not matter if you delete something important and drag them back immediately from the trash bin on Mac computer. But what if the trash bin has been emptied before you find the mistake you made? Where can you find deleted files on Mac? In reality, the space occupied by deleted files is marked as "invisible". It means they still exist until being overwritten by the new deleted files. To recover deleted files from Mac after emptying trash bin as soon as possible, there two major things you'd better figure out, why files disappeared from OS X system, and how to undelete files with ease.

Recover Deleted Files on Mac

Part 1. Overview of Deleted Files Recovery on Mac

Though deleting files on Mac is the common phenomenon to be heard frequently, it still differs quite according to further explanations. There are four main causes leading to deletion on MacBook mistakenly, which are failure, intentional action, unintentional action and disaster. You can read following descriptions of deleted files recovery on Mac.

The first "Failure" means all kinds of operation failures, including hardware failures, power failures, system crash, software corruption, data corruption and other similar causes.

And "Intentional Action" represents intentional deletion of files and partitions, or the hard drive formatting on Mac.

The "Unintentional Action" indicates you just delete the wrong files on Mac. Or the computer viruses attack, system hacking and other unexpected situations.

As for "Disaster" factor, it seldom occurs in people's daily life, like thunderstorms, floods, tomado, fire, etc. But once it happens, you may lose more than pure OS X data.

Part 2. How to Recover Deleted Files on Mac

You are suggested to backup MacBook Pro/Air to iCloud. But it will not be the disaster as long as you have a great data recovery. Get the good data recovery software on Mac is your top choice, to recover deleted files on Mac safely. And Disk Drill should be one of the most popular Mac data recovery software, which can recover wide selections of data on Mac OS X/11, such as critical business documents, music, photos, videos and other additional file types.

Section 1: Main Features of Disk Drill about Recovering Deleted Files on MacBook

You can recover deleted files from Mac OS X/13 easily even though the whole partitions went missing. And there is no requirements towards users, just prepare one USB cable, and then you are able to use the Mac data recovery app without expert skills needed.

  • Recover any file or folder more than 200 file types with several data recovery methods.
  • Support deleted files recovery on Mac internal storage or external storage, other major digital devices and even formatted drives are recoverable.

Section 2: How to Recover Deleted Data from Mac Hard Drive

Step 1. Launch Disk Drill

Download Disk Drill free version online, and you can upgrade it into the Pro version later. The latest Disk Drill requires Mac OS X 10.8.5 or later. For software installation on Mac, you need to drag the deleted files recovery software into "Application" folder, and then launch Disk Drill.

download disk drill

Step 2. Verify your disk condition

If your computer got heavy physical damages, then it is useless to recover deleted files from Mac with Disk Drill. Or you can use the free provided tools to detect the condition of your MacBook computer, and create a byte-to-byte disk image in DMG/ISO format.

verify disk condition on mac

Step 3. Recover deleted files from hard drive of Mac computer

If you wanna recover deleted files from Mac external hard drive, use USB cable to connect. Choose the name of the hard drive to recover with individual partitions. Or you can undelete files in Mac OS X/13 with more selectable choices. Moreover, the "Create boot drive" wizard can help you get recovered files of Mac USB drives as well. Choose the disk from the selectable list, and then start scanning on Mac. You can decide to deep scan, quick scan and other customizable scan methods from the provided list. Wait for 1 minute, and then you can recover deleted files from MacBook successfully.

recover deleted files from mac hard drive

Section 3: How to Recover Deleted Partition on Mac OS X

Step 1. Connect to the external drive to recover deleted files

Download Disk Drill and drag it into the "Applications" folder to launch. Whether you need to recover deleted data from internal hard drive or external drive, your recovered data still need to be saved into the external drive. Therefore, connect external drive to Mac. Select the disk to recover the disappearing partition from. Hit "Recover" button besides the main disk name.

connect external drive to computer

Step 2. Recover deleted partition on MacBook

Scan the whole disk for a while, and then Disk Drill will display scanned files in the resulting list.

If you have data files on SD card, just connect your SD card to this computer with reader, and start to get SD card recovery on Mac by following the steps below.

Hit the "eye" icon besides to check detail information. Choose before deleted files and set the destination folder. What's more, click "Recover" button to recover deleted partition on Mac selectively.

recover deleted partition on macbook

Part 3.Bonus tips – Recover deleted files on Windows

In this part, Windows users will get the bonus tip, how to recover deleted files on Windows computer. Apeaksoft Data Recovery is the helper that is indispensable.

Data Recovery

  • It is capable of recovering the deleted files from USB flash drive, recycle bin, hard drive, memory card, etc.
  • It recovers images in JPG, TIFF/TIF, PNG, BMP, GIF, PSD, CRW, CR2, NEF, ORF, RAF, SR2, MRW, DCR, WMF, DNG, ERF, RAW, etc.
  • It retrieves the media files in the formats of AVI, MOV, MP4, M4V, 3GP, 3G2, WMV, SWF, MPG, AIFF, M4A, MP3, WAV, WMA, MID/MIDI, etc.
  • Documents like DOC/DOCX, XLS/XLSX, PPT/PPTX, PDF, CWK, HTML/HTM, INDD, EPS, etc. are recoverable.
  • Email and other data like ZIP, RAR, SIT, and more are supported to get back.
  • Compatible with Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7/Vista/XP (SP2 or later).
Download for WinDownload for Mac

Here, you can get a video demo to recover deleted files on your computer.

Data Recovery on WindowsPlay

Tips and Tricks

If you do not have the clear impressions of above operations, you can get supplementary references here. There are two recovery modes you can choose including "Recovery Vault" and "Guaranteed Recovery". The first one can remove trash protection while the latter is able to protect certain folders and partitions in customize way.

As for "Quick Scan" and "Deep Scan", there is something important you'd better know. "Quick Scan" aims for people to recover deleted files with the intact metadata on HFS/HFS+, FAT and NTFS file system. And "Deep Scan" is the final and most powerful method to recover deleted files from Mac system, though it may take you several hours to scan if your deleted file is really huge.

All in all, no matter what you remove, or how long since the trash bin has been emptied, Disk Drill will always help you recover deleted files on Mac with free tools and professional filters easily.

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