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. MacOS Catalina Ready!
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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.

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

  • Ken Morrow
    Ken Morrow
    I had a Sandisk Extreme SD card go glitchy in my Samsung phone with about 4k photos and videos with no backup. 5 years of memories. Three of your “competitors” estimated a retrieval of 2000 items. One company never sent me a good product key. The others made excuses for results. One managed to actually retrieve a few hundred. Your software retrieved all but 150 items in perfect or near perfect condition!!! Nearly 4000 photos and videos. You guys are awesome!!! Those photos are my life!! Thank you.
    Read more
  • 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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