My MacBook Air running OS X Yosemite 10.10.5 suddenly restarted after a crash. After rebooting, I noticed that all my Office files (Word, Excel, etc.) in Finder and the files created within the past month on my desktop are missing, as if they were deleted. How can I recover the missing files? Thanks!
Hey! Sorry to hear this happened.
From what you described, it sounds like the crash may have caused some kind of file system issue, or the Mac did a forced restart that wiped recent changes from the drive. OS X Yosemite is pretty old, and the older HFS+ file system can sometimes behave like this after a hard crash.
Here are a few things you can try:
Go check your Trash
It sounds obvious, but sometimes files end up there after a crash.
Use Spotlight to search for your lost files
Search for a few file names or extensions like *.docx or *.xlsx. Sometimes files get moved to odd locations.
Use a data recovery tool
If the above two ways fail to find your lost files, you can try a data recovery software like iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac. This tool can help you search for and restore deleted, missing, and lost files on your Mac.
Here’s how:
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Download iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac on your Mac and then install and open it.
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Select your internal hard disk or the Macintosh HD - Data volume (user data volume) from the app’s main interface and click Search for Lost Data.
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Wait for the tool to scan your lost files.
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Check the scanning results, find and preview your lost Office files, and then select them and click Recover to save them to a different destination.