If you are unable to boot up your Mac in order to try any of our suggestions in the story lined to above, your next port of call is a data recovery app. Luckily there are a few options here, some of which have trial versions that may be able to recover some files, and should, at least, be able to indicate that it will be possible to recover what you need before you pay a penny.
Key attribute of an ideal mac data recovery software : Recovers all types of data – Photos, Videos, Documents, Audio, Emails, Archives, etc.
Let’s check a few of the apps: MiniTools from MiniTool Solutions will only let you recover 1MB of data before paying for the app, but it does at least offer you a 30-days money back guarantee, so if it doesn’t do the job you should be able to recover your money (although maybe not your data).
PhotoRec is not the most powerful free Mac data recovery tool, but it has the advantage of being open source. This basically means that not only the application, but also the source code is available to the public.
PhotoRec can work with OS X, Linux, Free BSD, Net BSD, Open BSD, and Windows. It can recover the most common file formats, such as JPEG pictures, MP3 audio files, OpenDocument and Microsoft Office files, PDF documents and ZIP archives. Files can be recovered from different devices such as digital camera memory cards, USB flash drives and hard disks.
This free file recovery Mac app uses a powerful technology known as file carving. This method consists of two steps. Firstly, it searches for the data block or cluster size. If the file system is not corrupted, this value is obtained from the superblock (ext2/ext3/ext4) or volume boot record (FAT, NTFS). If this is not possible, the app checks each sector of the device, and using the first ten files found, it calculates the block or cluster size. Secondly, the app reads the device, block by block/cluster by cluster, checking against the different file signatures available in the app’s database, thus assembling and recuperating the available files. Though it’s unclear how many of those file signatures are known to the app.
What we recommend:
Do Your Data Recovery for Mac Free 6.7 – Efficient free Mac data recovery software to completely recover lost files from Mac hard drive or storage device due to deleting, formatting, volume loss, OS crash, power failure etc. free Mac data recovery software. Do Your Data Recovery for Mac Free is the most reliable free Mac file recovery software that can recover lost files from both Mac machines and storage media. It is very simple to use, only three steps to get your lost files back.
Step 1: Select file types that you want to recover – All File Types are selected by default. If you only want to recover one or two or three etc file types of files, please select them on the interface. For example, if you only want to recover photos, you just only select ‘Images’, then the program will scan your drive or device and find only photos/images for you. It will save your time and get more focused scanning results.
Step 2: Select the drive or device where you lost files – Select the drive or device where you lost your files to start scanning. You can recover lost files from local/external Mac hard drive, as well as retrieve lost files from SD card, USB drive, digital camera, memory card or other storage media. You can even recover lost files from deleted/lost Mac volumes.
Step 3: Preview the files and recover them – You can preview the files to check their quality before recovery. Then recover what you want and save them on your computer or storage device. Please don’t save the found files on the disk where you lost your data, in case you overwrite the original data.
Do Your Data Recovery for Mac is a simple piece of Mac recovery software with a clean, intuitive interface and quick scan and recovery speeds. More info on Mac Data Recovery Freeware.