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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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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!

Disk Drill 4
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Customers and software gurus say

  • Paul7
    Paul7
    I had some .mpg files on a camcorder (Sony Handycam DCR-SR42) that had disappeared. At first Disk Drill couldn't see the files. However, the developer personally worked with me and was able to update their program so that it could detect the file!
  • makeuseof.com
    makeuseof.com
    Data recovery is not something we look forward to or use everyday, but it’s important to have a program like Disk Drill for when the inevitable occurs. Written by Bakari Chavanu
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