Mac OS X file recovery, whether you're working with native, external, or even flash drives, leads down more than one road. Much depends on the type of drive you're operating on, more specifically the formatting or filesystem of the drive (FAT recovery, NTFS recovery, HFS recovery, etc).
In this how-to, we've broken up the steps by filesystem. HFS and HFS+ are typically encountered in native Mac OS X drives. Where FAT systems are universal, NTFS is rarely used outside of Microsoft Windows environments. All of these drives, regardless of their origin, can be scanned for deleted files by Disk Drill. None of these scanning techniques are very difficult to use, but they do vary in approach.
How to...
Disk Drill, free Mac app for recovering your lost data, is a great tool for all Mac lovers.
Emiel
Runs on any PPC
or Intel Mac with Mac OS X 10.5+ |
|
File system recovery (FAT, NTFS, HFS, etc) for Mac
#1
Download and install Disk Drill
First download Disk Drill file system recovery software for Mac OS X. Installing is as easy as dragging it to your Applications folder and authorizing a special daemon on the first run. You'll need to enter your administrator password for this. Optionally, drag the Disk Drill application to the Dock for easy access.
#2
Select the drive to be recovered
There are two tabs in Disk Drill application, distinct in functionality: Protection and Recovery. The first is where you enable Recovery Vault, which will make FAT recovery and HFS recovery infinitely faster and more reliable. The Recovery tab is where you scan your drives for deleted files and attempt a FAT recovery, NTFS recovery, HFS recovery or other files system recovery.
Your physical drives and partitions are all listed here. Select the one that harbored your deleted files. Scanning techniques that are unavailable due to the nature of the drive will be automatically grayed out.
#3
Mac file system HFS recovery
Mac HFS recovery is easy if you've got Disk Drill's Recovery Vault enabled, using the Undelete option. In mere minutes, Disk Drill will scour the Recovery Vault data and present a list of all salvageable files that were deleted while Recovery Vault was active, preserving the original location and filename. It's the best way for HFS recovery on your Mac, and the feature that separates Disk Drill from the pack.
Without advance preparation, you can also perform a Deep Scan to look for deleted files and folders. Deep Scan will take a lot longer to complete, but is sure to find every file that can still be saved. On the downside, Deep Scan will not tell you the original name or location of a file.
#4
FAT/FAT32 and NTFS recovery on Mac
USB flash drives, external, or secondary hard drives are likely to run on FAT or FAT32 filesystems instead of the native HFS Mac formatting. Drives with FAT file systems support either scanning technique: Quick Scan, Deep Scan and Recovery Vault. NTFS file systems can also be scanned using Quick Scan and Deep Scan, but are not supported by Recovery Vault.
Quick Scan, unique to FAT recovery and NTFS recovery, is the second fastest method on the block and uses the FAT system's own logs to quickly present a list of deleted files that might still be undeleted. It's a great way to scan for files that were deleted very recently.
Recovery Vault actually works very similarly to Quick Scan, but keeps better track of the deleted files and is able to present results more quickly and reliably. If Recovery Vault wasn't enabled, and the files were deleted too long ago to reliably use Quick Scan, Deep Scanning the drive is a final solution. This will take the longest time to complete and won't retain the file names, but is very thorough in sniffing out deleted files to complete NTFS and FAT recovery.
#5
Deep Scan any volume or filesystem
Deep Scan might be the slowest scanning technique that Disk Drill offers, but it's also the most thorough and universal one. Even if your hard drive has been formatted or corrupted, Deep Scan will be able to put together a lot of the files that went missing. Of course, the more damaged your drive, or the more time has passed, the less likely Disk Drill will be able to save your files and handle an effective FAT, NTFS or HFS recovery.