How to perform MacBook Air hard drive recovery

Have you lost critical business documents or priceless family photos? Use Disk Drill free software to scan your MacBook hard drive and find out if your files are still there.
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How to perform MacBook Air hard drive recovery
MacBook Air data recovery is easier than it may seem. Sometimes your data is lost for good, but a lot of times the files are still there — they have just become “invisible”. Whether you lost your files by mistakenly emptying the trash, hard drive crash, or lost partition, Disk Drill can help.

Disk Drill has four types of scanning algorithms that can scan your MacBook Air drive, repair damaged partitions, find deleted files and rescue the files before they are lost for good. MacBook Air hard drive recovery is easy when you have Disk Drill.

Before You Get Started: SSD vs HDD Hard Drives

Unfortunately, Disk Drill cannot recover lost files from MacBook Air models that have an SSD (solid state drive) with TRIM enabled. (Please see this article for more information). However, Disk Drill does have a data protection feature that works great with SSDs: Guaranteed Recovery. Once you have installed Disk Drill and enabled Guaranteed Recovery, you will be able to recover any future lost files — even on an SSD drive.

If your MacBook has a “regular” HDD (hard disk drive), read on to proceed with MacBook Air data recovery.

Download Disk Drill Basic for Free

One of the best things about Disk Drill is that you can scan your drive and see if your files are recoverable completely for free. Simply download the free edition, Disk Drill Basic, from the cleverfiles.com website to get started with our Apple hard drive data recovery software.
  • 1Download Disk Drill
  • 2Drag to Applications Folder
  • 3Launch Disk Drill

Install and Launch the App

Once you have the app downloaded, double-click on the downloaded file and proceed with installation. Next, launch the app and get ready to recover MacBook Air files.

Scan Your MacBook for Lost Files

Select your internal hard drive from the list of drives presented, and then click the “Recover” button next to it to start your scan. It can take anywhere from several minutes to many hours for it to finish scanning your MacBook hard drive. Scan Your MacBook for Lost Files

Data Protection Is Important

It is best to activate Disk Drill’s data protection features as soon as you install it: Recovery Vault, Guaranteed Recovery and S.M.A.R.T. monitoring. These features will help minimize the chance of data loss on your computer and ensure you can always recover MacBook Air data.
Data Protection Is Important

Rescue Your Lost Files

Examine the list of recovered files and click the preview (eye) icon to preview any files found. If you find files you wish to recover, select them and click the “Recover” button.
Learn more about the best Mac data recovery software
Follow the instructions for upgrading to Disk Drill PRO and then proceed with your data recovery from your MacBook hard drive. Rescue Your Lost Files

Advanced MacBook Air data recovery with Deep Scan

When Disk Drill starts using its Deep Scan feature it doesn't care if your hard drive is FAT, NTFS, or whatever. It breaks all data into a series of bits to be able to collect the smallest pieces into a structure. Disk Drill starts to apply its profound knowledge of file signatures. Once the known signature is discovered, it's easy to restore file types like .jpg, .doc, .xls, etc.
View the complete list file types

No time to waste!

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Customers and software gurus say

  • Chris Tonick
    After suspecting my drive completely dead, I had left it connected to my system while Disk Drill was still active. When I came back to close the software later, suddenly the drive was showing up in the readable volumes in Disk Drill and it wanted to rebuild. I attempted to rebuild the HFS structure (it couldn’t be saved), but it did manage to find all the files on the disk so I was able to mount found items as a volume and get everything copied off. All this to say in a long roundabout way, I was finally able to get the drive to mount before it failed completely and recover the data I needed. Thanks guys
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  • tutsplus.com
    We'll all experience data loss at some point in our computer-using lives so the more we can prevent it, the better. But when that fateful day does happen, you now know that there’s still a lot more you can do and data recovery isn't as scary (or expensive) as it sounds! Jordan Merrick