Recover Data from Mac External Hard Drive for Free

In a world full of expenses, we seek for free things in life and free Mac data recovery is one of those few things which are not so hard to find. This article shall cover all the free and effortless methods to recover data from a Mac external hard disk drive along with the best free Mac data recovery software.

Although there could be many reasons for data loss from a Mac external hard disk drive, the below mentioned methods should recover data lost due to logical damage to the storage device. Logical data loss is due to reasons like deletion, partition corruption, partition deletion, format, reinstall, virus etc.

METHOD 1: Restore The Data Using The Trash

When a file is deleted from a Mac device or even an external hard disk drive connected to it using the keys ‘Command + Delete’, it goes directly into the Trash. The user can easily recover files from the Trash by going into the Trash, selecting the files and choosing the ‘Put back’ option from the list which appears after right-clicking.

However, if the files were deleted using ‘Command + Shift + Delete’ keys, then the files bypass the Trash folder and get flushed out of the computer system. Also, if it has been more than 30 days since the data was deleted or lost, then it could not be found in the Trash as the folder automatically empties after 30 days.

METHOD 2: Restore the Data Using the Time Machine

Time Machine is an application offered by Apple in all of its devices that is a built-in backup system which creates a backup of each version of the computer every hour. This way it can cover the past 24 hours which sums into daily, weekly as well monthly versions of the computer system. The user can use Time Machine backup to recover data from the external hard disk drive by connecting it to the computer system.

However, this method works only if the Time Machine was synced for data back up before the loss of the data from the external hard disk drive.

METHOD 3: Recover the Data Using Free Mac File Recovery Software

In case the data could not be found in the Trash and there was no useful backup version in the Time Machine, it is the time to take help from a third party for the purpose of data recovery on Mac. Although there are various software available in the market free data recovery Mac, Stellar Data Recovery Software for Mac is the best among all of them. Not only the features offered by the software are great for data recovery Mac, the process involved in the process is also very simple. The user can follow the below mentioned steps to recover data from the external hard disk drive for free.

• Install and run the Stellar Data Recovery Software for Mac on the computer system.
• Connect the external hard disk drive to the computer system using a USB cable.
• Select the type of data which is required to be covered by the software.
• Select the external hard disk drive from the list of locations in the software and click on the Scan button to command the software to scan for the recoverable files in the selected location.
• From the list of the recoverable files created by the software, preview all the files and select the ones which are required to be recovered.
• Once the selection is made, click on the Recover button so that the software can restore the selected files.
• Finally, complete the process by saving the recovered files in the new location.

What Is So Great About Stellar?

Stellar offers to recover lost data upto 1 GB for free which include word files, excel sheets, emails, photos, videos etc on Mac. The software will not only recover data from Mac external hard disk drives but also successfully work with MacBook®, MacBook Air®, MacBook Pro®, iMac®, Mac mini® and more. This software will handle any kind of data loss situation due to logical damage be it formatting, corruption, deletion, etc. 

Conclusion

Either the Trash or the Time Machine application should be able to get your lost data back effortlessly for free so that it could be used again. However, if not these, then the Stellar Data Recovery Software for Mac shall recover upto 1 GB of the lost data for free. This software is very fast and quick in recovering files from Mac which were lost due to logical damage to the storage media. With a guarantee of 100 percent data recovery, this software will fulfil your purpose without fail.

However, to avoid such situations in future, it always advised that a safe backup of the important data should be taken before using it. A data backup in the future can ensure that you wouldn’t need to recover data using either a Trash, Time Machine application or a data recovery software such as Stellar.