Hi guys,
I unintentionally deleted some important videos from my SD card and emptied the Trash. Can I trust any free Mac data recovery software to get them back? Please recommend the best data recovery software for Mac you’ve used or share the pros and cons of the software you used to help me pick one. It doesn’t have to be free, as I’m willing to invest in a reliable data recovery tool suitable for typical data recovery scenarios. Thx a lot!
Here are a few tips that may help you pick the best Mac data recovery software:
The main disk formats that Mac computers support are APFS, encrypted APFS, HFS+, FAT32, and exFAT.
The common file formats include JPG, TIF, PNG, and GIF (for Mac photo recovery), DOCX, HTML, PDF, CSV, TXT (for document recovery), and MP4, M4V, F4V, M4R, MOV, 3GP (for video recovery).
Here’s the free data recovery software for Mac I know. (They are completely free!)
PhotoRec for Mac: free, open-source, command-line interface, incompatible with encrypted APFS, support ext2, ext3, and ext4 file systems, only supports up to Mac OS X
Lazesoft Mac Data Recovery: free, incompatible with APFS, no support for T2 & Apple Silicon Macs, only supports OS X 10.9 -10.5
These two are the best data recovery software for Mac that are entirely free. Since they are free, they’re not updated for a long time. If you want to take the risk and give them a try, clone your SD card and scan the clone with the tool to avoid tampering with your SD card.
In my experience, iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is the best Mac data recovery software. It recovered the deleted files I emptied from the trash efficiently. I’ve used it with external hard drives of various brands, such as WD or Seagate, and it showed excellent recovery success.
According to its official webpage, it supports both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs and can recover permanently deleted files, or files lost due to lost partitions, unbootable Mac, drive formatting, or disk corruption.
Here’s a rundown of the popular data recovery tools:
Second for iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.
I used to use Lazesoft Mac Data Recovery with my old Mac that’s formatted in HFS+.
It offers two modes - Fast Scan to rapidly undelete files, and Deep Scan to recover lost files from a formatted, damaged, or deleted partition.
This software worked fine, however, after I upgraded to an M1, it stopped providing satisfying recovery results.
After a bit of research, I found that Lazesoft doesn’t support APFS and does not support OS X 10.9 and later.
So I switched to iBoysoft. It allowed me to preview the recoverable files and retrieve all lost files from an unmountable external WD drive.
PhotoRec for Mac isn’t for average Mac users. It requires knowledge of the command line, as its user interface is similar to Terminal (the Command Prompt on Mac), which is not a user-friendly modern graphical interface at all.
It was designed to provide photo recovery features for DSLR camera users, but it also supports data recovery of other storage devices.
How it works: Locating data by block and cluster size contained in superblock (ext2/ext3/ext4) or MBR datasets, it can calculate the block or cluster size using the first ten files found and then recover lost data from a Mac.
My experience with PhotoRec is OK. This Mac data recovery freeware successfully recovered JPEG pictures, MP3 audio files, and Microsoft Office files on a Mac running El Capitan. But I’m not sure how well it’ll work on modern macOS because it hasn’t been updated for ages.
Softtote Data Recovery has a simple user interface that displays three wizards: File Recovery (recovering deleted Mac files and documents), Photo Recovery (recovering any type of photo), and Lost Partition Recovery (recovering lost, overwritten, damaged, or formatted partitions).
You can also retrieve lost audio, videos, archives, and emails on an internal Mac hard disk and external hard drives with Softtote. It is not suitable for complex data loss scenarios since it supports a limited number of file formats such as bmp, jpg, png, tif, and mp3. Besides, it only supports Mac OS X 10.7 ~ macOS 10.14, has an outdated user interface, and doesn’t work with T2, M1, M2, or M3 Macs.
It’s slightly cheaper than other data recovery software applications for Mac but it doesn’t support the more advanced exFAT and APFS file systems.
Personally speaking, EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac is a bit pricey. Like most commercial data recovery tools, it has an intuitive interface and allows you to preview files before recovery. However, the scanned results it provides also include files that can’t be recovered. I also noticed that it shows inaccurate scan time estimates and is unable to scan the entire hard drive. It supports most of the common file formats except for encrypted APFS.
Disk Drill is also a good Mac file recovery tool. I guess it’s similar to other top-rated recovery tools mentioned above but provides some extra disk tools, such as disk health checking or disk space analyzer. In addition to macOS, this tool also supports iOS and Android devices.
But if your drive is formatted in encrypted APFS, this tool won’t be much of a help because it doesn’t support this format.
I had some experience with Recoverit for Mac. It got most of my deleted files back from an external hard drive. This data recovery tool also has an advanced video recovery feature that’s exclusive to users who purchase the Professional version, which is expensive.