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Losing a critical PowerPoint or Keynote presentation can be a disaster. But data recovery of presentations on your Mac is possible – and Disk Drill can help.
Even after files are deleted, your Mac often saves an invisible copy of the file for a while, until it is overwritten by new data. Disk Drill will scan your Mac and check for any hidden files. It can also help repair lost or corrupted partitions, so if you’re having trouble seeing files on an external drive, it may be able to help with that too.
Check out the steps below for a quick overview of Mac data recovery for presentations. The best part is that the Basic edition of Disk Drill is completely free, so there is no risk in downloading the app and giving it a try.
There are many different situations that can lead to the loss of your PowerPoint presentation files. Here are some common examples:
It doesn’t take much to accidentally delete a PowerPoint file—one wrong click is often enough to make one or more presentations disappear in an instant.
Whether deliberate or caused unexpectedly by a power outage, a sudden shutdown doesn’t leave any time to save your PowerPoint files.
You better think twice before you format any storage device because all files stored on it are guaranteed to disappear, including your PowerPoint presentations.
An encounter with malware can have many consequences, and data loss is, unfortunately, among them. That’s why you should follow cybersecurity best practices and actively protect your computer against malware.
If your file system becomes corrupted, then any files on the affected storage device can become inaccessible, including .ppt and .pptx presentations.
From water or electrical damage to physical destruction caused by an undesired demonstration of gravity, hardware issues have many different causes, and their consequences are always serious.
Lost PowerPoint presentations that haven’t yet been overwritten can be recovered using a data recovery tool like Disk Drill. The process is simple, and the following instructions explain everything you have to do.
Start by downloading the free version of Disk Drill. Double-click the downloaded installation file to open it and follow the installation instructions. Once installed, you can launch Disk Drill and complete the initial guided setup process.
Select the drive you lost your presentation files on and then click the “Search for lost data” button. Disk Drill will run all of its recovery methods in the optimal order. You can either view scan results in real time by clicking the “Review found items” while the scan is still in progress or wait for it to finish.
Carefully review the list of files presented and note that your original file name may have been lost. You can preview each file by clicking the “eye” icon next to each file name. Be sure to preview the whole file because that is the only way to ensure that the file is not corrupted.
If you have found the presentations you need to recover, select them by clicking the checkboxes next to them and then click the “Recover” button. Disk Drill will ask you to specify a suitable recovery location.
After completing the data recovery process, click the “Show results in Finder” button to see the recovered PowerPoint presentations in finder. Open all files to verify their integrity.
Using a capable data recovery software application like Disk Drill, you can recover PowerPoint files from any device on Mac, including:
Lost PowerPoint files can be recovered from SSDs that don’t have the TRIM command enabled.
Presentations deleted from any unencrypted HDD may be recoverable a long time after their deletion, depending on how much the device has seen.
Both compact SSD-based external hard drives that don’t require a dedicated power supply and larger 3.5” external HDDs are often used to store .ppt and .pptx files.
It’s a common practice to place a PowerPoint presentation on a USB flash drive before plugging it into a port on a computer connected to a projector.
While there are many different memory cards, the steps you need to recover lost presentations from them are mostly the same.
PowerPoint files can be served over a network to other devices connected to it, and they can also be recovered the same way.
* If TRIM is disabled. Learn more >
Protection options offered by Disk Drill are outstanding! Guaranteed Recovery, Recovery Vault, and S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring are keeping an eye on your hard drive performance, keeping invisible copies of deleted files and recording all metadata for meticulous files restoration.
While capable of delivering excellent results, data recovery software like Disk Drill isn’t your only option for getting important PowerPoint files back. Let’s explore other methods that are worth trying.
Deleted PowerPoint files usually end up in the Trash folder, and recovering them from there could hardly be easier:
If your deleted PowerPoint files are not in the Trash folder, then don’t give up because they could still be physically located on the storage device where you originally saved them, and they could also be included in one of your backups.
Many Mac users rely on Time Machine to create incremental backups of important files. If you’re among them, then retrieving lost PowerPoint files should be easy:
The restored files will be moved back to their original location.
When you work on a presentation in PowerPoint, the application automatically saves a copy of the file in the background every 10 minutes thanks to a feature called AutoRecover. This copy is automatically opened in the event of an application or system crash, but you can also open AutoRecovered files manually:
/Users/X/Library/Containers/com.Microsoft.Powerpoint/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecoveryYou can then attempt to open any files you find in the folder just like you would regular PowerPoint presentations.
Recent versions of Microsoft PowerPoint support a useful feature called AutoSave. With this feature, you can save a presentation to Microsoft OneDrive or SharePoint in Microsoft 365, and PowerPoint will automatically save any changes you make to it in real-time, so you won’t lose more than a few seconds of progress regardless of which data loss scenario you happen to encounter.
Since AutoSaved PowerPoint files are saved either in Microsoft OneDrive or SharePoint in Microsoft 365, you can recover them from any device simply by logging in to your cloud storage account and downloading them to your device. Alternatively, you can open them directly from PowerPoint after signing in with your Microsoft account.
Software-based data recovery methods can deliver great results when recovering accidentally deleted PowerPoint presentations, but they’re unable to address physical storage device damage, one of the most common causes of data loss.
Instead of attempting to repair a damaged storage device at home and risking ruining your one and only chance to recover lost PowerPoint files, it’s better to hire data recovery professionals and let them use their experience and expertise to retrieve your files.
Disk Drill will scan deep when you encounter a case with hardly any file structure left. No matter what type of drive you need to recover – FAT, NTFS, etc. – it'll look for a file signature until it's found. Then Disk Drill will do the best job of putting the fragments together and not only recovering PPT, KEY, or ODP files, but also XLS, DOC, AVI, MP4, JPG, and others.
Updated on by Disk Drill Team
You can quickly and easily recover a lost PowerPoint presentation on a Mac using data recovery software like Disk Drill:
On Mac computers, PowerPoint recovery files are stored in the following location:
/Users/<username>/Library/Containers/com.Microsoft.Powerpoint/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery
You can recover an unsaved PowerPoint file from the AutoRecover folder:
/Users/X/Library/Containers/com.Microsoft.Powerpoint/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecoveryIf you’re struggling to open a PowerPoint file because the file has become corrupted, then you can use the First Aid feature in Disk Utility to check the volume where the file is located for errors:
Microsoft PowerPoint should automatically recover your PowerPoint file following a crash, but you can also find any AutoRecovered files on your computer manually:
/Users/X/Library/Containers/com.Microsoft.Powerpoint/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery
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