How to Recover Data from Mac Mini Hard Drive

Data can be lost when you least expect it. If you’ve lost critical files, Disk Drill can help you recover deleted data on Mac Mini in a few easy steps.
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How to Recover Data from Mac Mini Hard Drive
Disk Drill can recover virtually any file type — Microsoft Office documents, photos, videos, zipped files, or music files. Even if you can’t see your files due to emptying the trash by mistake, reformatting your drive, losing a partition or other calamity, Disk Drill can find invisible deleted files still hiding on your drive.

Best of all, Disk Drill Basic Edition for Mac Mini data recovery is completely free. That means you can restore deleted data on Mac Mini and preview your files to make sure the ones you need are there, before you make a decision to upgrade.

Prepare for Recovery

Recovering from your Mac’s internal hard drive is a bit trickier than recovering from external drives. The first step is to stop using your Mac as much as possible. Any activity can overwrite the data you are trying to save. In an ideal world, you would recover deleted files using Target Disk Mode with another Mac. If that’s not possible, we recommend installing Disk Drill in Portable Mode on a USB drive. Also, read through this article if you need to recover data on Mac Mini SSD (such as the flash storage portion of a Fusion drive).
  • 1Download Disk Drill
  • 2Drag to Application Folder
  • 3Launch Disk Drill

Connect a Large External Drive

You will need an external drive to recover files to during the Mac Mini hard drive data recovery process. Ideally it should be big enough to create a copy of your entire hard drive — that way you can scan and recover from the copy, leaving the original data untouched.

Install Disk Drill in Portable Mode

If you can’t use Target Disk Mode, then Portable Mode is the best option. Connect a USB drive to your Mac, then download the Disk Drill app. During the installation process, instead of dragging the Disk Drill app to your Applications folder, drag it to your USB drive.

Scan Your Drive

Launch the free Disk Drill software program from your USB drive and select your Mac Mini hard drive partition from the list of drives. Click the “Recover” button and proceed with your Mac Mini hard drive data recovery.
Mac hard drive data recovery tips and hints
Disk Drill will begin scanning. The scanning may take from a few minutes to many hours, depending on the size of your drive and the number of files. Scan Your Drive

Have You Used Data Protection?

After installing Disk Drill make sure to activate its data protection features: Recovery Vault, Guaranteed Recovery and S.M.A.R.T. monitoring. These will work towards minimizing the chance of data loss in the future and will provide you with easier Mac Mini hard drive recovery.
Use Data Protection

Preview and Recover

Once scan is over, you can preview the found files by clicking the preview (eye) icon next to each file. Previewing is necessary because some files may be corrupted.
Do-it-yourself Mac files recovery software
Once you have previewed each file, select the ones you wish to restore and click the “Recover” button. You'll need to upgrade to PRO if you haven't done so before and you are all done with your Mac Mini data recovery. Preview and Recover

Deep Scan Goes After File Signatures

When Deep Scan is working through the raw data from a hard drive it doesn't matter if it is FAT, NTFS, etc. All the data is just a series of bits to our Mac Mini hard drive recovery software. Going through the accessible fragments of files Disk Drill applies its knowledge of file signatures to them. Once the known signature is found, file types like .jpg, .doc or .xls, etc. are easy to restore.
View the complete list of file types

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Customers and software gurus say

  • Ross Metcalf
    Disk Drill, Mac file restore program saved my bacon today. Amazing how old some of the stuff I retrieved was
  • Prathvin Gunasekaran, SJSU
    Disk Drill is a perfect safeguard for those who choose to keep their personal files local. Also can be an awesome addition to iCloud users who are frequently traveling. I personally used it on an older MacBook Pro to recover files I have not had access to for almost half a decade. These files I thought lost forever were able to be salvaged thanks to Disk Drill. This is a perfect tool for those who would like to save money and recover files themselves without the hassle of dropping personal devices at Greek Squad.
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