Yesterday, I was working on an Adobe Photoshop project, then the app crashed without warning me to save the Photoshop file. The project was my whole day work. I suddenly became panic, but soon calmed down and managed to recover the unsaved PSD file on my Mac.
You may come to the similar situation and I understand how important it is to restore unsaved Photoshop files on Mac. By following our guide, you can recover Photoshop files no matter they are unsaved after crash, disappeared, deleted, lost, or corrupted on Mac.
Best Data Recovery for Mac and Windows
Free Download macOS 10.15 or later
Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7
Among many solutions to recover PSD files on Mac, using a dedicated Photoshop data recovery progam is always the most popular one. Since a professional program is capable of bringing higher recovery rate and allowing users to find back various types of files.
According to users, Cisdem Data Recovery is highly recommended to do Photoshop file recovery because of its effectiveness, high recovery rate and easy-to-use interface.
Cisdem Data Recovery is the best data recovery software for Mac users to recover photos, images, documents, iTunes music, archives and other files from hard drives or other computer-compatible storage media. Whether your Photoshop files get disappeared or damaged due to app crashes, power failure or improper operations, you can always rescue them back with this professional Photoshop file recovery tool.
Free Download macOS 10.15 or later
Like Microsoft Office app or MS Word, Photoshop for Mac (Photoshop CS6 and above or Photoshop CC 2014/2015/2017/2018/2019/2020/2021/2022/2023/2024/2025) also has an AutoSave feature that can automatically save Photoshop files, which can be used to recover unsaved Photoshop files even after crash on Mac. The AutoSave feature should be enabled by default and you can change AutoSave option by following the guide below.
Notes: To be clear, Photoshop AutoSave belongs to crash recovery, neither user error recovery nor a kind of backup. If you have configured the AutoSave setting, you can auto recover unsaved Photoshop files. The next time you open Photoshop app after crash or unexpected quit, you will see the auto saved PSD files. If it wouldn’t show the autosaved files automatically, you can also find them manually in paths as following.
While if the files are normally closed without saving, the content of AutoRecover folder will be deleted. In this case your unsaved Photoshop files can’t be recovered with AutoSave.
Above is just an example to find the autosave location of Photoshop CS6.
Based on different versions of Photoshop on Mac, replace following XXX with any versions: ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/XXX/AutoRecover.
When a new PSD file is being created, its temporary file is also created to contain information. Normally, the temporary file is supposed to be automatically deleted after closing the Photoshop app. But sometimes due to the crappy file management of Photoshop, the temporary file may still stick around. In such case, you can simply follow steps below and get hands on where to find Photoshop temporary files on Mac.
Many Photoshop users may not know that they can recover Photoshop files directly in Photoshop app whether the files are unsaved, deleted or lost. Here are the right steps to recover unsaved Photoshop files from Recent tab within Photoshop. Though it is not 100% for sure to restore an unsaved Photoshop file on Mac in this way, it is worth a try.
In the case that your Photoshop file is unsaved and missing after a crash, you can check the Recent folder on your Mac to find back the unsaved Photoshop file.
Creative Cloud comes in handy when you have accidentally deleted a PSD file or when your Photoshop file gets lost after the computer glitch. Once you have Adobe Creative Cloud account and have set up the sync option, missing Photoshop files can be easily restored from this online storage.
If you don't mind spending some time on recovering lost or deleted Photoshop files on Mac but want a free solution, you can try PhotoRec, a text-based program to do data recovery with command lines. It can restore photos, videos, audios, documents and others from both internal and external hard drive.
It is really heartbreaking to lose an Adobe Photoshop file especially after you have spent lots of time working on it. And above 7 proven solutions can handle all of your unsaved or deleted Photoshop file recovery needs. Moreover, to avoid data loss, it would be better to manually save the PSD files after any changes and regularly backup them elsewhere.
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.
Charlie Smith
I had the similar experience with the author. This morning my PS also got crashed somehow and I found one of my projects disappeared. Then I hold a view to purchase and try Cisdem Data Recovery. A good news is this tool helps to find my file successfully. It works well on my macOS Ventura laptop.
Barrett
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