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How to recover files from external hard drive on Mac?

Updated on Wednesday, May 31, 2023

iBoysoft author Anna Yuan

Written by

Anna Yuan
Professional tech editor

Approved by

Jessica Shee

English

How to recover files from an external hard drive on Mac?

Summary: You can recover files from external hard drives on Mac, be it deleted or lost. We will guide you through the details and help you get your files back with this free iBoysoft Data Recovery tool from the corrupted external drive, even if it is unreadable or unmountable.

how to recover files from external hard drive on Mac

 When the external hard drive is not showing up or recognized on Mac, the first concern for most users is the important data stored on the drive. How to recover files from the external hard drive on Mac?

The good news is that you can recover data on Mac from an external hard drive with Mac data recovery software like iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery. iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is skilled at hard drive data recovery. It can recover lost data from the external hard drives when it's not recognized, not readable, not working, or not showing up on Mac. 

Moreover, this data recovery software can recover lost data from formatted, corrupted, and unmounted external hard drives. It supports data recovery from APFS, HFS, HFS+, exFAT, and FAT32 formatted external hard drives.

This program works with macOS 12 to Mac OS X 10.9. Now follow the below tutorial to recover files from the external hard drive on Mac step by step.

How to recover files from an external hard drive on Mac:

Install and launch iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac

First, download and install iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac on your Mac or MacBook, and then launch the app. Before launching this Mac data recovery software, you need to connect the corrupted external hard drive to your Mac. Later, you can check if the external hard drive is detected and show up in iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac software.  

Select the corrupted external hard drive to scan for lost data

When the Mac data recovery software is launched, all connected storage devices will be listed in the interface. You can see the name, file system, and space allocation of your hard drives and partitions. If you can find the corrupted external hard drive in the list, select it and then click Scan to search for data on this external hard drive.

Two scanning modes are allowed: Quick scan and Deep scan. Quick scan mode saves time for users and is applied when data is recently deleted. Deep scan mode finds more files at the cost of more time, and it's used when the file system is corrupted or the partition table is lost. Anyway, this software will automatically choose the most efficient way to scan files according to the disk condition.

scan disk to find lost files

Preview the searching results and recover the target ones

iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac has a preview feature, with this feature, you can check whether your files on this disk are in a good condition or not. It saves a lot of time and money for you. The software will show if your file is corrupted so that you would not waste energy to recover it or pay for this data recovery product.

If you find the target data and it is in a good condition and can be recoverable, simply click Recover to get it back.   

recover-files-after-scanning

Finally, after ensuring all files you need have been recovered successfully, you can use Disk Utility to format the external hard drive and make it work again.

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