Recover Data on Your iMac Hard Drive

Things happen, losing your business documents, family photos or videos can be very upsetting and untimely. If files have gone missing from your iMac hard drive, Disk Drill can help.
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Recover Data on Your iMac Hard Drive
Data loss on your iMac hard drive can occur for many reasons. Regardless of the cause — emptying the trash, lost or corrupted partition, hard drive crash — Disk Drill can help you with data recovery on your iMac hard drive. Sometimes your data is overwritten and gone for good — but not always! Disk Drill can scan your iMac and see if your files are still there. And best of all, the Disk Drill Basic edition is completely free.

Prepare to Recover Data

Whenever you feel like you need to recover Mac data from your internal hard drive on iMac, you want to be sure you use your iMac as little as possible because any activity could result in overwriting the data you wish to rescue. Installing Disk Drill in target disk mode or in portable mode are your best options. Be sure to have a large external drive available to save any rescued files to — preferably one large enough that you can copy your entire iMac hard drive on it. And please read this article if you have an iMac with an SSD (flash or Fusion drive).
  • 1Download Disk Drill
  • 2Drag to Application Folder
  • 3Launch Disk Drill

Install and Scan

Install Disk Drill on another Mac (if using target disk mode) or on an external drive (if using portable mode). Once installed, launch the app and get ready for your iMac recovery.
How to recover deleted files on Mac
Select your internal drive from the list of drives and click the “Recover” button. Disk Drill will go through each of its scanning options one by one and display the list of files it found. Install and Scan

Protect Your Data

Once you have recovered your files, be sure to turn on Disk Drill’s data protection features: Recovery Vault, Guaranteed Recovery and S.M.A.R.T. monitoring. These features will help minimize the chance of the data loss in the future and will make it very easy for you to quickly recover data on iMac hard drive.

Preview and Recover

Review the list of files carefully to see if the files you need are there. The files may not have familiar file names, but you can filter by file type and file size to narrow down the list.
How to recover unsaved Word & Excel documents on Mac
Preview files by clicking the preview (eye) icon next to the filename. It’s important to preview because otherwise you won’t know if your file is corrupted. When done, select the files you have chosen for data recovery on your iMac hard drive and click the “Recover” button. Preview and Recover

Deep Scan Is About File Signatures

When reading raw data from a hard drive with Deep Scan, Disk Drill doesn't care if it's FAT, NTFS, or whatever. All the data is simply a series of bits to our hard drive recovery software. This is exactly where Disk Drill starts to apply its knowledge of file signatures. And it has quite a few! Once the known signature is found, it's easy work to retrieve file types like .jpg, .doc or .xls, etc.
View the complete list of file types

No reason to hesitate!

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Customers and software gurus say

  • Heuna Chung
    Heuna Chung
    THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!! I have my first exam for my Political Science class on Thursday, and the 25 paged document I typed was done on a Guest Account (yes I know, very dumb of me), then all of sudden the guest account crashed and ALL OF MY LECTURE NOTES WERE GONE. I immediately got your product and now I HAVE MY NOTES BACK!!!! THANK YOU SO MUCH! You guys are awesome and legit. I was worried that since it was in a guest account, it was permanently gone beyond repair, but luckily Disk Drill was able to even find the document in a temporary storage. So happy!!!!
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  • Angelique Malabey, SJSU
    Angelique Malabey, SJSU
    In my field of study, data is important so protecting it is crucial. I needed a program that could help me recover sentimentally important pictures from an old hard drive that had been corrupted. I have tried many recovery tools but they were either inadequate or very expensive. During a class discussion, I was introduced to Disk Drill by CleverFiles and I decided to give it a try. Not only have I been able to recover most of my lost files, but also clean up my current hard drive. Disk Drill goes beyond just helping you recover files you can also establish a form of backup, clean up your drives by looking for and removing duplicates. I love how intuitive the program is as well as very user-friendly. I am still a novice when it comes to Disk Drill, but that is okay since if you do get stuck they came prepared and have help links just about every where. I look forward to recovering files from other devices such as old Android phones and iPhones. I love that the program can be used across the board with most of your devices. Disk Drill turned out to be more than what I had expected and I look forward to seeing what other things I can do with Disk Drill.
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