Summary: Accidentally deleted files on your external hard drive? Is your external hard drive suddenly not visible on Mac? Didn’t back up any data from the external hard drive? This page will introduce the best external hard drive recovery software and show you how to restore valuable data by yourself.
The convenience of external hard drives is undeniable. These hard disks are affordable and a great way to back up important data and share files between computers. People often save their important personal, business data, and work documents on the external hard drive. However, the more data you store on a single external hard drive, the more possible the data will be losing in a single moment. Lots of external hard drive users face a similar situation: an external hard drive becomes corrupted and data can’t be accessed anymore. Except for that, there are some other data loss situations, such as accidental deletion, mistaken formatting, virus attack, etc.
Read on to know how to recover data from an external hard drive on Mac.
Before performing external hard drive data recovery
It has a great chance to get deleted or lost data off an external hard drive. But the premise is that you make the right way. Here are certain precautions to make to ensure it ends with success:
Please stop using the drive as soon as possible. Because the more time you spend using your external hard drive, the greater chance that the operating system will overwrite the original data and make data recovery impossible.
When you lose data from your external hard drive, the most urgent thing is about how to recover data from it. But if you are using a wrong hard drive recovery tool, you could make your problem worse and lose the chance to recover data.
Let’s go ahead to learn how to recover data from an external hard drive.
How to recover data from an external hard drive?
How can I recover files from an external hard drive? Actually, external hard drive data recovery can be easy. Here are two ways:
Solution 1: Restore lost data from Time Machine backups
Mac provides users with a built-in feature to back up your data called Time Machine. If you turn Time Machine on, it will automatically make hourly backup versions of your computer. Here is how to restore data from Time Machine backups.
Step 1: Click on the icon in the menu bar and choose Enter Time Machine.
Step 2: In the Time Machine window, you can browse the items by using the onscreen up or down arrow on the right side or using the timeline on the screen. You can press Space Bar to preview it to determine what you want.
Step 3: Find the files or folder you need and click Restore.
Solution 2: Use Mac data recovery software
If you can’t find files in the Time Machine backups, you can still recover them with a professional data recovery tool, like iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac. It is the most feature-complete data recovery solution in the market. Not only does it support over 300 different file formats, but it also let you recover from both internal and external hard disks, including Macintosh HD, external hard drives, SD cards, USB flash drives, etc. iBoysoft Data Recovery does cover plenty of recovery options. No matter how you lost data, such as accidental deletion, formatting, system crash, file system corruption, virus attack, etc., this software will get all of them back.
What makes iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac different from other data recovery software is that the program can even recover data from MacBook Pro/Air that has been protected with T2 chips. Currently, it’s the only one in the market which makes T2 chip data recovery possible.
Steps to recover data from an external hard drive with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac:
Step 1: Download and install iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.
Step 2: After opening this software, it displays your computer’s drives on the home screen itself. Please specify the partition you want to scan for files and click the Scan button. You can temporarily click the pause button to suspend the scan process and tick Save session on the top right corner if you have a more important job to do. The software will create an autosave file, so you can load session and perform your recovery later at a more convenient time.
Note: Can’t find the partition that you want? You can have a try to click Find Lost Partitions on the top right corner.
Step 3: Preview the recoverable files and choose the one you want to get back. Once the scan has completed, the recovered files will then be presented in an organized list. You can find your desired files based on a file type, path, the time the file was modified.
Step 4: Then click Recover and choose a location to restore them.
Conclusion
Losing data on external hard drive is very common. But it’s not difficult to get deleted or lost back. Among all the solutions mentioned above, iBoysoft Data Recovery for Macis the ideal choice to handle a variety of common data loss situations. Free download the software and install it on your Mac, which won’t let you down.
Now, the post is going to end. Hope that you have recovered files from your external hard drive.