Data is more important than ever in 2019, often being in the form of an important memory, such as a photo or video. Or, it could be some important business documents, reflecting the financial status of a company. It could be something as simple as an important project, too.
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Unfortunately, accidents happen, and that data can be easily wiped off of your Mac. Sometimes it can be easy to recover, allowing you to simply pull it out of the Trash can. Other times, it requires a little extra work to recover.
If you follow along with us below, we’ll show you five of the best ways that you can follow to recover your deleted data. Let’s get started, shall we?
Best Ways To Recover Deleted Data On Mac
1. EaseUS Data Recovery
Create a backup of your Mac
Before we get started, you’ll want to make sure that you do a backup of your data before you mess with any data recovery methods. And that’s because some methods can actually cause file loss. In most cases, they don’t, but you never know if you’ll run into a strange issue, hang up, or an unexpected shutdown during the recovery process.
That said, we’d recommend using something like Dropbox, Box, or Google Drive to at least backup all of your important files. Carbonite is a pretty good option as well.
And of course, you’ll want to have a good backup system in place for when you recover your files, too. You certainly don’t want to go through this process again, and having a good backup system in place simply means less stress the next time around.
A backup system allows you to simply restore deleted files in just a couple of seconds.
If you tried recovering your data already from Mac, and failed, EaseUS and their free Data Recovery software for the Mac will be able to help you out.
You don’t have to be a technical wizard to use EaseUS Data Recovery. In fact, they make it simple for even the layman to recover data from your Mac.
The first step is to download and install the program. You might need to enable downloading from unknown sources, since you cannot grab EaseUS from the Mac App Store, just like a variety of other programs out there.
Once installed, launch the program, and then select the disk or partition that you need to recover data from. Most commonly on Mac, this is going to be your primary SSD drive.
After you highlight the drive that you want to recover data from, press the blue Scan button at the top right corner. Depending on how much you have on your Mac, this can take some time to complete.
While the scan is running, you will see a preview of all of your recoverable files. This gives you the ability to run through a list to try and find the files that you lost.
Once the scan is complete, we can start to recover deleted data on Mac. You can go through the file list and select the files that you want to recover. You’ll want to make sure the box is checked on the files that you want to recover. After you have selected all of the files that you want to recover, you’ll want to click on the Recover Now button at the top-right corner of the program.
One of the cool things about the EaseUS Data Recovery program is that you can choose to save them to the Cloud or to your local system.
While EaseUS does offer a free trial version of its data recovery software for you to use, features are limited there because, well, it’s a free trial! That said, for a limited time only, EaseUS is allowing you to pick up its Mac Data Recovery software at a 50% discount for the Pro version of the software.
2. Check your Trash program
One of the first places that you should always check for lost data is in your Trash can, otherwise known as the Recycle Bin over on Windows. When you accidentally press the Delete key on your keyboard, this is usually where those files end up.
The Trash can holds your deleted files for a small period of time before emptying them permanently, so you can usually go back and find those lost files by just opening up the Trash can icon.
You can go through the file list, and then select and recover the ones that you accidentally got rid of.
3. Carbonite
Carbonite is another excellent way to recover deleted data on Mac. They are well known for their backup software, but they actually offer file recovery through their backup software as well.
One of the highlights of Carbonite is the easy ability to setup the backup software, and then have it automatically backup to the Cloud daily. It costs $6 per month, but the value that the peace of mind offers totally exceeds that.
The cool thing about setting that up is that you’ll never have to worry about “accidentally” losing data ever again. You’ll always have a backed up copy in the Cloud.
But, more importantly, Carbonite has some excellent Recovery features. So long as your device is Web-connected, you can easily recover files that you thought were previously lost. Here’s the word from Carbonite:
“If something ever goes wrong with the files on your computer – or if something terrible happens to the computer itself – Carbonite cloud backup ensures that all your files are safe and easily retrievable from the cloud.”
That said, Carbonite does require you to set it up and start backing up right away. It won’t be able to recover files if Carbonite hasn’t already been setup on your machine. However, after you setup Carbonite for the first time, you won’t have to worry about losing a file permanently ever again.
The “con” to Carbonite here is that it does cost $6 per month, whereas you can get free data recovery with an EaseUS free trial. Still, around $60 per year isn’t too bad for the peace of mind that it offers.
4. Time Machine
One of the cool things about the Mac is that Apple has data recovery built right into it. It’s called Time Machine. If you’ve never heard of it, you might be living under a rock as far as the potential for your Mac goes.
Once you start backing up with Time Machine, you’ll always be able to restore the files from the Time Machine backup. Here’s the official word from Apple’s documentation:
“You can use Time Machine, the built-in backup feature of your Mac, to automatically back up all of your files, including apps, music, photos, email, documents, and system files. When you have a backup, you can restore files from your backup if the original files are ever deleted from your Mac, or the hard disk (or SSD) in your Mac is erased or replaced.”
The cool thing about Time Machine is that you don’t have to download anything extra on your Mac. Time Machine is already built into your Mac. The only thing that you need to get Time Machine to start working is an external storage device. This could mean a mechanical hard drive, or you could use a slightly faster SSD.
If you’re going out and picking up a new hard drive to enable Time Machine to work, you’ll want to pick up something that has a lot of space. This is because Time Machine can take up a lot of space, since it actually houses backups for your Mac for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for all previous months.
That said, you can start filling up your external hard drive pretty quickly, especially as weeks and months go by. And you’ll need to be careful, because according to Apple, the oldest backups are deleted when your backup disk is full. So you’ll want to make sure that there’s always plenty of room in the event that you don’t want old backups deleted.
Now, Time Machine isn’t able to recover data without you having that backup already setup. Once you have it setup and backups constantly running, Time Machine does make it easy to recover lost files: You can easily restore your files from that backup. You might want to do so after the original files are deleted from your Mac, such as on accident. Another good solution for backing up with Time Machine is if the hard disk (or SSD) in your Mac is erased or replaced, such as during a repair.
5. Fields Data Recovery
Fields Data Recovery is another method recover deleted data on Mac worth keeping an eye on. If you used any of the four methods that we listed above, and data recovery still didn’t work out well, you might want to consider sending your Mac out to service that will be able to recover your lost data for sure.
Fields is able to tear into your Mac, broken or not, get into the hard drive, and give you a list of recoverable files. This is usually a very delicate and unique process that even the average computer technician is not able to complete. Here’s how it goes down, from Fields Data Recovery themselves:
“The techniques that our technicians will utilise will differ depending on the cause of failure. In any event, though, Fields possess the specialist engineers and the state-of-the-art equipment needed to repair your organization’s hard drive and fully recover your data.”
Generally, engineers are in a sterilized lab, and do some very delicate work to extract data from a dead hard drive. As Fields themselves says, the method used to extract data all depends on what caused the hard drive to fail. However, extracting data like this can usually cost your hard drive a couple hundred dollars.
One of the cool things about Fields Data Recovery though is that they usually provide you with a free inspection within 24-hours of receiving the device, and then offer you options on how to proceed.
It’s worth noting that even experts like Fields Data Recovery aren’t always able to successfully retrieve data off of a hard drive; however, they do advertise a success rate of 92.5%, which is really good for the industry.
After you send your Mac in, and go ahead with the data recovery, Fields Data Recovery works quickly, and moves your recovered data onto a new media device. They then ship to you with next-day mail, so that you get it as soon as possible.
Fields Data Recovery keeps data on hand for seven days in case of any queries or problems you might have, and then securely deletes that data after that seven days is up. Suffice to say, you can trust that your data will be extremely safe with Fields Data Recovery.
Best Ways To Recover Deleted Data On Mac Verdict
As you can see, you have a lot of different options for Mac data recovery. The first thing that you should always be doing is checking your trash can. This is where most accidentally deleted files end up, and if your file is there, recovery literally takes just a couple of seconds to recover.
If the Trash can method doesn’t work, the next best thing that you can do is grab the EaseUS Mac Data Recovery software. It’s able to do a lot of behind the scenes work to find you’re missing data. Depending on how much data you have on your computer, that can take a little bit of time, but is well worth it for getting your data back.
If that doesn’t work, unfortunately, you may have to take more extreme and expensive measures with a send-in service like Fields Data Recovery. They’re able to usually get your data back, but almost always will cost you quite a bit of cash. That said, depending on what it is, you may just want to implement a better backup plan in the future so that you never lose data again.