I'm running a MacBook Pro, and have a Seagate external hard drive. And I have many photos and movies on the external device. About a week ago I formatted it accidentally on my Mac and found that it was empty. All files had disappeared. I'm eager to know if there is any external hard drive data recovery for Mac to recover data from external hard drive. Please Help!
The above mentioned was the question a Mac users raised in a forum, and I found that more than the questioner, there are also many users don’t know how to perform external hard drive recovery. And there are many external hard drive issues discussed in forums and Quora. In this article, I will talk about some common external hard drive issues and solutions and then show you how to recover data from external hard drive on Mac easily.
There are a number of reasons of hard disk failure. Below is a list of common external hard disk issues and solutions that everyone should know:
1. External hard drive formatted
Sometimes, your Mac may ask you to format your external hard drive or you may format it accidentally when connected to Mac.
Solution: Try other USB ports or connect it to another operating system to see if the problem exists. If it still exists or you already formatted your device, you can follow below guide to rescue your data from the external hard drive first.
2. External hard drive didn’t show up or invisible
This is the most common issue of external hard drive. When you plug in your external hard drive on your Mac, it doesn’t show up. This usually happens because your Mac can’t read a Windows formatted HD.
Solution: Try other USB ports to connect or plug in it to PC. If it still doesn’t show up, check if the volume is visible. And follow instruction from the below screenshot to make it visible.
3. Virus threat of external hard drive
When a virus or malware program attacks the hard disk, the disk’s system may get infected and results in hard disk failure. Sometimes it even causes data loss.
Solution: Use anti-virus app to find and delete the infected files of your drive. Update your Mac system on a regular basis and update the anti-virus program frequently so that it can detect almost all kinds of viruses and malware programs of your external hard drive when connected to Mac.
4. External hard drive mount failure
Sometimes your external hard drive appears in Disk Utility but not in Finder or on the Desktop. In Disk Utility, you only can format it. Much worse, you can’t boot and erase it.
Solution: This situation might be complex, and the solution may depend on the brand of you external hard drive. For example, Seagate external hard drives always have the issue. If you get one, you can download a drive for Mac OS 10.9+ here to solve the problem. For others external hard drive, you can contact their Tech support.
No matter what issues you come across, the data on external HD is always the thing you want to get. If unfortunately you lose data during the process, you can follow below guide to recover data from your external hard drive.
The most common practice for users to deal with external hard drive data loss issues is sending it to repair or giving it up. Actually, recovering data from external hard drive is not as hard as you imagine. To recover files from external hard drive on Mac easily, you need an external hard drive data recovery.
There are many data recovery software that can recover data from external hard drive. Cisdem Data Recovery for Mac is one of the best external hard drive recovery software that can help Mac users to recover their lost, deleted, formatted or inaccessible data from the external hard drive on Mac. Here are the main features of this external hard drive data recovery software:
Works with a wide variety of external hard drives from many brands. The list includes: Seagate, Toshiba, Western Digital, DELL, Hitachi, SamSung, LaCie and many other external hard drives.
Recover files to local drive or cloud (Dropbox, OneDrive, GoogleDrive, pCloud, Box)
It's amazingly fast, accurate and a breeze to use. And it is compatible with Mac OS 10.9 or later. You can try it and follow below several steps to restore data from external hard drive.
We've all got many gigabytes of valuable data backed up to external hard drives. Some of us have never lost any data due to a hard drive failure; while some, ahem, one of my friends, have had some sort of hard drive issue and lost weeks or months worth of archiving. How to prevent an external hard drive from data loss? Below are some tips or tricks:
In conclusion, if you lose your important data from external hard drive due to unknown reasons or you don't have a backup to recover, you can always try Cisdem Data Recovery for Mac to recover data from external hard drive. Download it below and start your external hard drive recovery process.
Megan has an impressive deal of experience with Mac software and has the ability to explain tech stuff in a simplified, straightforward and easy to understand way.
Usefultechtips
Great article...It worked very nicely and you can recover the data. After that you need to just rename your recovered files.
Dominic
I've used Cisdem data recovery to recover data from an external HD that stopped functioning. It worked great and the only hassle was that the Data Recovery would rename your recovered files.