Data Recovery (macOS)

This is a quick reference of different data recovery software (macOS). I had to use these after I accidentally deleted quite a lot of photos on my external drive. Many of the photos were from our recent India trip incl. birthday celebration for Oliver, and site-seeing (Jaipur, Delhi). Needless to say it was quite a debacle to have lost those photos.

Most software allow you to see file names, sizes, timestamps of recovered files, and some also allow you to preview those. To recover, you will need to purchase license which can be anywhere from $50-150. All of these required full disk scan which could take anywhere from 3 to 30+ hrs depending on the size of the disk. My disk is 2TB NVMe.

Disk Drill – decent GUI, allows you to do the scan of the disk and previews. I started with this software but got impatient and moved to trying something different.

R Studio – not as intuitive GUI as others, but seemed to be recommended quite a lot (reddit, etc.). I ended up buying full version of the software and paid $70. It was able to recover a lot of files but all of them weren’t the files I was looking for. Also, one time it froze my MacBook and I had to run the disk scan again which takes 3-4 hrs.

Wondershare Recoverit – most intuitive GUI, and allows preview which is good. The scan is very slow, and took ~35 hrs, and it doesn’t look like you can save scan information. The result was same as R Studio.

Data Rescue – the GUI was intuitive but same result as R Studio. The scan seemed fast but I stopped it in the middle, and see the recovered files up to that point. It was the same result as R Studio.

In conclusion, none of these software provided me the results I was looking for. All of them were able to recover files much older than those that were deleted for some unknown reason.

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