How to Recover Data From Flash Drive on Mac, Even Free without Software?

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Connie Yu
January 04, 2021 Preview 4.8K Preview 2
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Being small, portable, fast and holding large capacity to store or transfer data, a flash drive is widely used across different walks of life. It brings great convenience and benefits to us, but the data loss still happens, due to different reasons, like accidental deletion, virus attack, etc.

Even with data loss, we have professional tools and methods to tackle this today. Here for users who want to recover data from flash drive on Mac, we have the solutions for you, even you want to recover data from flash drive on latest Apple Silicon M1 MacBook Pro or Air, and even recover for free without any software.

Easiest Way to Recover Data from Flash Drive on Mac

The easiest way to get your data back is always asking an expert to do the recovery, instead of paying for a recovery laboratory, we recommend using a professional data recovery tool which is easier and faster to restore data.

Cisdem Data Recovery for Mac should be your first choice to do the recovery. First of all, it offers tidy design, excellent user-friendliness and affordable price. Also, with its easy-to-use interface, Cisdem Data Recovery for Mac can recover lost, deleted or formatted files from both internal and external drive. That is to say, you can recover data from Mac internal hard disk, but also from USB drives, SD card, digital cameras, iPods, etc. This program supports recovering videos, audios, photos, documents and others.

Steps to Recover Data from Flash Drive on Mac

  1. Insert the flash drive into your Mac, make sure your Mac can detect and access to flash drive;
  2. Download and install Cisdem Data Recovery, run the program;
    Free Download
  3. Go to Disk Data Recovery;
  4. Choose your targeted disk. Click on “Search for lost files” and the scanning process will begin.recover flash drive mac cisdem01
  5. After the scanning process, you can preview the files one by one and then select them all for recovery. recover flash drive mac cisdem02
  6. Lastly, click "Recover" to recover data from flash drive on Mac.

Recover Deleted Files from Flash Drive on Mac Free without Software

In the above part, we use a piece of data recovery software to get your flash drive data back to your Mac, but is there any solution to recover deleted files from flash drive on Mac without installing any recovery software? The answer is YES, but only possible when you have backed up files on your flash drive, otherwise, there is no way to recover deleted files from flash drive without installing any tool, even you pay for a recovery expert, he/she will absolutely need to recover with the help of a tool.

#1 Check Trash Bin

Most of the time, we read and write the data from a flash drive on a Mac, if you accidently delete files from flash drive on Mac, as long as you don’t empty the trash bin to permanently delete the files, you may be able to recover the deleted files on Mac.

  1. Go to Trash bin;
  2. Find the deleted files, right click on the file and choose Put Back;recover from flash drive without software01 
  3. The deleted file will be recovered to the folder where your files were originally saved, you can open to check the file;

#2 Recover via Backups

If you have a backup for the deleted files on your flash drive, you will be able to restore the files without installing any 3rd party software, you just need to find the backup files, then sync or save to your flash drive again.

There are multiple ways to back up files online or offline, by storing on your mac internal hard drive or other external storage devices, or by syncing to your Cloud storage service accounts like iCloud, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. It is easy to recover deleted files from back ups from other storage drives, just copy and paste the files to your flash drive again. Here we will take iCloud as the example to demonstrate how to recover deleted files from flash drive on mac with backup.

  1. Go to iCloud website and login into your iCloud account;
  2. Select the files you want to recover to your flash drive;
  3. Then click Download to save the files to the Downloads folder on your Mac;recover via icloud backup
  4. Finally, copy and paste the downloaded files to your flash drive on Mac.

How to Recover Data from Flash Drive on Mac with Free Software?

In the case that you want to recover data from flash drive on mac with free data recovery software, PhotoRec seems to be the best choice, after all, there are just few free data recovery tools, including Recuva for Windows and PhotoRec for Mac, virtually all data recovery programs require payment.

PhotoRec helps to recover data from both internal and external drive on Mac, including flash drives, but it is just a command-line tool requiring pressing arrow keys to choose and run the commands for the data recovery. Comparing with other professional flash drive data recovery tools, PhotoRec has a lower recovery rate, which means, some of your flash drive files may not recovered by PhotoRec.

How to Recover Data from Flash Drive on Mac with Free Software?

  1. Download and install PhotoRec onto your Mac;
  2. Run the program using Terminal, you will need to enter the user password for your Mac;recover data from flash drive free01
  3. Use the Arrow key to chose the flash drive and press Enter to continue;recover data from flash drive free02 
  4. Choose the partition and file system type, press Enter to continue;
  5. Choose the destination to save your recovered flash drive files, press C to start the photo recovery process;
  6. Find the recovered flash drive files in destination folder on your mac;recover flash drive data mac free03

More Tips on Using Flash Drives

Be patient with flash drive data recovery. No matter what program you are using to recover deleted files from flash drive, the scanning may take some time. Depending on different file sizes and system configurations, the speeds differ a lot.

Choose good-quality flash drives. Flash drives are portable and may be kept on a key chain, carried around your neck, or attached to book bag, they are therefore usually fragile to some extent. It is a wise for us to buy some good-quality flash drives in case that they get corrupted and all the files lost one day.

Some popular secure flash drives to recommend: Iron Key personal D200, Kingston Data Traveler 4000, Kanguru Defender Elite, SanDisk Extreme Contour, Disk Go secure guardian, Data Traveler Vault Privacy Edition, Jump Drive Secure II plus, etc.

Remember to use the "Safely Unplug Hardware" option. Flash drives generally tolerate immediate removal, but do yourself a favor and remember to safely eject them before removing them, just to be sure. This cuts down on the possibility that data will be lost in the first place.

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Connie Yu

Connie Yu has been a columnist in the field of data recovery since 2011. She studied a lot of data loss situations and tested repeatedly to find a feasible solution tailored for each case. And her solutions are always updated to fix problems from the newest systems, devices and apps.

Comments (2) Leave a Reply

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  • Dghgjjk

    Is the Cisdem flash drive data recovery software free? I hope to try it.

    9 years ago commonReply

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    • Rosa Reyes

      I'm afraid you need to pay for it, but at a very competitive and worthy cost when compared with other applications in the market.

      9 years ago

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