We all know the despair that strikes us when we accidentally delete a file; we then try desperately to recover files Mac. If we are lucky, the file will be found in the Trash bin. If we are unlucky, we probably woke up to the fact that an important file is lost after clearing out our Trash bin. It is just the kind of thing to happen on a bad day. How do we recover files on a Mac? It is not an easy process, but it is possible to recover files Mac.
Stop Whatever You Are Doing
This is the first thing to do when you realize you have lost an important file and it is gone from the Trash folder too. Cease All Other Activity.
When your operating system deletes a file, all it really does is mark the space on your hard drive that your file occupies as free space. The file is still there, but your computer is now perfectly happy to write new data on top of it, at which point the file recovery process becomes a lot more difficult. That means you should do as little computing as possible until you find the file you are looking for, since every time you save a new file, or every time your computer writes information to your hard drive, your chances of recover file Mac decrease.
Recovering Deleted Files In Mac
You can recover deleted files by using programs that are developed for this purpose, such as Time Machine, Norton Utilities’ Unerase, FileSalvage, Data Rescue II and so on.
Whether you lost a file or a folder on your Mac system, you can use these tools to recover them.
Most of these utilities work in the same way. Your hard drive is scanned for deleted files. Once the scan is complete, you will see a big list of jumbled file names. Often most of these files are nothing more than system files that your operating system has created in the course of basic operation, and you will not need to worry about them. You are just looking for the file type and name that matches what you have lost.
Recovering Deleted Files Using Time Machine
To restore deleted files using Time Machine, perform the following tasks:
Close all other windows in Finder; keep only that folder open
Launch Time Machine from the Applications folder or the Dock (if you have it there)
You will see your original file folder in the foreground and other windows that represent past iterations of the folder in the background
Select a point in time in which the file(s) or folder(s) in question existed. This will depend on when it was deleted, from an hour to a month ago, or even longer
Click Restore once you have found the erased files or folders you want to recover. The items will be brought back to the present in the same folder they once inhabited
Restoring Deleted Files Using Norton Utilities
If you have Norton Utilities installed, here’s an easy method to recover files Mac:
Launch Norton Utilities’ Unerase application
Select the disk where the files were originally stored
Click the Quick Search button to scan erased files
View the list of erased files and select the files that you want to unerase
Click Recover to unerase the selected files
Select a folder in which you want to save the recover file (preferably not the original file folder). Norton Unerase places the recovered files in a Recovered Files folder at the location you choose.