Home > Questions

My files on the external hard drive disappeared, want to recover!

I'm running a Macbook Pro, and have a Seagate External Hard Drive connected to it. On the drive I have tons of movies, tons of music, and a bunch of photography. About a week ago I noticed that one of the folders with my photography was empty. None of the hard drive space was changed, but upon opening the folder it contained no files, they had disappeared.

Best Answered by

iBoysoft author Amanda Wong

Amanda Wong

Answered on Thursday, March 9, 2023

When you find your files are lost on an external hard drive, you can recover files from it on Mac with data recovery software such as iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac as long as the data haven't been overwritten.

As you said that the folder is empty but the drive space hasn't changed. It is possible that the lost files are hidden so that you can not view them on your external hard drive on Mac. Thus, try to unhide files on Mac with the shortcut command-Shift-Period(.) or the following command lines in Terminal.

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles true

killall Finder

If unhiding files on Mac doesn't make the lost files on the external hard drive show up, you could check the Mac Trash where the deleted files go to. Perhaps, you accidentally deleted those files and they are moved to the Trash, still occupying the disk space of the external hard drive. If so, put the deleted files back from the Mac Trash.

Unluckily, both of the above methods don't work to restore the lost files on the external drive, then perhaps there is corruption on the drive making the files invisible. Then, you could try professional data recovery software which could recover files from an external hard drive external that is damaged, corrupted, formatted, unreadable, not showing, etc., iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac stands out for its high recovery rate, risk-free environment, and easy-to-use interface.

Just download, install, and launch this software on your Mac, then freely search for lost/deleted files on the external hard drive, freely preview the scanned result, and recover the desired files to a different location. 

People Also Ask

Read More Questions

Read More Advice From iBoysoft's Computer Experts

Comment récupérer les fichiers d un disque dur externe RAW

Comment récupérer les fichiers d'un disque dur externe RAW

Lisez ce qui suit pour savoir pourquoi votre disque dur est devenu RAW et comment récupérer les fichiers d'un disque dur externe RAW sur un PC Windows. Vous apprendrez également comment réparer le dis

Comment récupérer une carte SD formatée sur Windows et Mac

[Gratuit] Comment récupérer une carte SD formatée sur Windows et Mac?

Ce post explique si vous pouvez récupérer les données des cartes SD formatées sans logiciel ou gratuitement, et les étapes pour récupérer les cartes SD formatées sur Windows et Mac.

how to recover data from unmounted SD card

How to Recover Deleted & Lost Data from Unmounted SD Card?

Read this post to know how to recover data from unmounted SD card with iBoysoft Data Recovery. Plus, this post explains the causes and fixes to troubleshoot an unmounted SD card.

SD Card Recovery