My name is Adrian Try and I’ve worked in IT for quite a while, and exclusively with Macs for the last ten years. With the jobs I’ve had, you’d imagine I have plenty of experience recovering lost data. Why Trust Us?
Stellar Mac Data Recovery. With more than 25 years of experience, India-based Stellar Info packs all the features you might need into its Stellar Mac Data Recovery software, healing the wounds caused by mishaps such as data corruption, accidental deletion, and unwanted disk formatting. Users have the option of selecting the file type that they. Stellar Data Recovery Professional v10.0 has powerful capabilities for restoring lost data in vast scenarios, ranging from accidental deletion to lost or corrupt partition and drive formatting. The software restores data from crashed Mac, offering you peace of mind in tough situations when you’re unable to boot and access the Mac startup volume.
Believe me, I’ve seen a lot of computer problems! But throughout all of those years, I’ve only had to run data recovery software four or five times when crucial data was lost in a disaster caused by computer failure or human error. I was successful about half of the time.
That’s not a lot of experience, so I wanted access to the opinions of those with a significant amount of experience using these apps: those who specialize in data recovery. I hunted for test results of industry experts who ran the best Mac data recovery apps through their paces.
What You Need to Know Up-Front about Data Recovery
How does data recovery work?
If it’s gone, how can you get it back? The fact is, when you delete a file or format a drive, the data remains. It’s just that the computer’s file system no longer keeps track of it. As you continue using your computer, the data will eventually be overwritten.
Data recovery software can use this knowledge to help you get your files back, using strategies like these:
Data recovery is your last line of defense
Computers can lose information because of human error, hardware failure, apps crashing, viruses and other malware, evil hackers, natural disasters, or just bad luck. Sounds ominous, doesn’t it! So we plan for the worst.
If you’re wise, you’ll regularly back up your data to multiple locations (find out which data backup software is best for you), and run anti-malware software as well as other security-related apps. You may even use a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) to give yourself enough time to save your work when the power goes out.
So when disaster strikes, chances are you’re covered. Check your backups. Check the trash on your Mac. You’ve planned for this.
It’s those rare times when all of your preparation fails that you turn to Mac data recovery software. It’s your last line of defense. Hopefully, you won’t need it often, but it’s good to know it’s there.
Data recovery may cost you a lot of time and effort
Mac data recovery apps can run quick scans (which may take just minutes or even seconds) to recover data that was lost in a number of ways. These are handy, and worth trying, but can’t recover data from every situation. You may need to run a deep scan.
These can take many hours, or even days or weeks. Your entire drive needs to be examined carefully to locate as many recoverable files as possible. On a large drive, that may be thousands or even hundreds of thousands!
That means finding the right file can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Most apps include a search feature, but that only helps if the filename was recovered. You may need to go file by file and preview each one until you find the file you are looking for.
Data recovery is not guaranteed
Your file may be irretrievably corrupt, or that sector of your hard drive may be damaged and unreadable. However, Mac data recovery apps use a number of strategies to maximize your chance of success. And that begins before disaster strikes. Start running data recovery now, and it will take steps to protect your data, and warn you when drives are about to fail.
It’s possible to unintentionally write over your data while trying to recover it. So don’t save anything to that drive. When trying to recover data from your Mac’s main drive, that means booting from an external drive while attempting recovery. Many of the apps we cover give you this option.
If you fail to recover the data on your own, you can call an expert. That can be costly but is justified if your data is valuable. Just be aware that the steps you take on your own may actually make their job harder, so try to make this decision as early as possible.
Hard drives vs SSDs
Solid state drives are now very common in Macs. Yet in certain situations, data can’t be recovered from an SSD. PCMagazine explains:
One failing that bothered us in all these apps—including our top picks—is that they didn’t even warn us that we couldn’t recover files from an SSD. It’s easy for an app to tell whether a drive uses spinning-platter or SSD technology, and easy to tell whether TRIM technology is active in a drive. All of the software we reviewed, both on the Mac and PC, misleadingly told us that they were able to recover deleted files from SSDs—and then disappointed us by providing corrupt and unusable files instead of the ones we wanted.
TRIM technology increases SSD efficiency and service life by clearing disk sectors on that aren’t being used, so it’s often turned on by default. But this makes it impossible to recover files from the Trash after it has been emptied. I tested this with every app we cover in this review and failed with each one.
So it’s time to make a decision: TRIM or no TRIM. If data recovering files from an emptied Mac Trash is more important to you than the speed and efficiency of your drive, you can turn TRIM off. How-To Geek gives a detailed tutorial here. Alternatively, become more careful and conservative about emptying the Trash—maybe check what’s in it first.
Recovering Lost Data under macOS 10.13 High Sierra and Later
As a security feature in recent versions of macOS, users are stopped from accessing the built-in system drive by any app. This is called “System Integrity Protection”. Unfortunately, it stops Mac data recovery apps from being able to do their job.
This can be disabled from System Preferences, and most data recovery apps will explain this when they are first opened. For example, when first running Stellar Data Recovery for Mac, I was shown the following message.
Steps to take before you attempt data recovery
Once you realize you have lost data, you need to act fast. The longer you wait, the more likely it is that your data will be overwritten and lost forever. If necessary, turn off the computer until you can attempt recovery.
The first thing you should do is create a disk image of your drive. This type of backup includes all of the lost data from the original drive and is a safeguard. Many recovery apps include the ability to create disk images. From there, begin to run scans on the drive (or the image), starting with a quick scan, then a deep scan if it’s not successful.
For more information, check out these Do’s and Do Not’s of Data Loss.
Who Should (& Should Not) Get This?
If you like to play it safe and perform regular backups (as you should), you may like to run data recovery software as well. Running it before you encounter data may well make it easier to get your data back. In addition, it will monitor the health of your hard drive, and prompt you to act before your drive dies.
But maybe you haven’t been playing it safe, and you just lost some important or sentimental files from your computer. Then these apps are for you. And in most cases, if you run a trial version of the software, you’ll find out whether your data can be recovered before you spend any money.
How We Tested and Picked![]()
Mac data recovery apps are not all the same. They vary in their usability and features offered, and may employ different recovery strategies, so often differ in the number of recoverable files they can locate. As we compare the competition, we’ll try to help you make the best decision about which one will suit you best. Here’s what we looked at when evaluating:
How easy is it to use the software?
Data recovery is tricky, so some apps focus on ease of use. They minimize what you need to know and the number of choices you need to make to recover files. These suit most people. Other apps are a little more difficult to use but may deliver better results. They’re more suitable for data recovery specialists and power users.
Which recovery features are included?
Most scanning apps let you do quick and deep scans for lost files. Some apps offer a list of more specific scans that may save you time by not scanning for everything. Besides scanning for lost files, here are some key features we looked for:
Apple’s new APFS file system is relatively new. Even recently, not all recovery apps supported it. Thankfully, most Mac recovery apps now do.
How effective is the software?
Apps use various strategies to discover lost files on your drive. As a result, some apps may be more effective than others at finding files that can be recovered. How do you determine which are most effective? Lots of testing. In this review, I took three categories of tests into account:
Here is the list of industry tests I refer to:
While all apps performed about equally with quick scans, deep scans split up the field. Some apps I’d shortlisted as winners—Prosoft Data Rescue and CleverFiles Disk Drill—found significantly fewer files to recover than our winners. More on that later.
For my own test, I copied a folder of 10 files (PDFs, Word Doc, MP3s) to a 4GB USB stick, then deleted it. Each app—except Prosoft Data Rescue—was successful.
I also noted the total number of recoverable files found by each app on the drive:
MindTool’s huge 6056 files include 3044 documents and media files (which is what the other apps are listing), and 2995 “other” files. This brings the result down close to the other top runners.
How fast are the scans?
Best beat making softwares for mac. I’d rather have a successful slow scan than an unsuccessful fast scan, but deep scans are time-consuming, so any time saved is a bonus. I didn’t look for a clear winner here, and slower scans don’t guarantee better results, but you’ll find some observations about scanning speeds below.
Value for Money
Here are the costs of each app we mention in this Mac data recovery software review, sorted from cheapest to most expensive:
The Winners
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