It’s really a great pain for us to lose important files from Mac or other storage devices due to different situations, but no one can avoid. Now, you’ve lost precious data, how to get it back?
If you always backup data, you can recover it from Time Machine or other backup locations. Otherwise, you’ll need a piece of Mac data recovery software that aims at recovering deleted or lost data from your storage device. But what is the best Mac data recovery program? Here, we’ll show a full list of 16 best Mac data recovery applications, of which seven are free to use, including one data recovery utility built in macOS.
Cisdem Data Recovery for Mac
Free Download Before probing into the third-party software solutions, some of you may wonder if there’s a way to recover Mac data without extra tools. Gladly the answer is YES! An useful built-in data recovery app on all macOS systems is called Terminal, whose operations are based on the command line. In case you just recently deleted a Mac file by accident, it’s still highly possible to restore it by executing specific command lines in Terminal.
If Terminal proves to be of no avail, your lost Mac files are likely to be permanently removed. Now you’re in an emergency to look for a suitable Mac data recovery software to retrieve them back before data overwritten.
Actually, over the past 5 years, we’ve tested dozens of Mac data recovery programs, most of which are similar in function and performance. Here we just pick 9 classic and best apps for your information.
Taking performance, specification and value for money into considerations, we conclude that Cisdem Data Recovery is the top best software on data recovery.
This software scans the lost data on your drive, identifies the types of files and helps you recover them, in an extremely easy way. You don’t have to be tech savvy or know much about data loss, this intuitive program will take your lost data back to you effortlessly.
It is 100% clean without any virus or malware, provided that you download it from the official website. You can click below download button to download it safely or click the safe link to try it for free:https://download.cisdem.com/cisdem-datarecovery.dmg. And it only performs read-only procedures on your device, so it is secure as well and won’t do any damage to the device.
What we like about Cisdem Data Recovery is the interface. It is adequate for all levels of computer users and the recovery process is quite straightforward. You can make necessary changes on the specific data you prefer to recover in advanced settings. This can be very handy if you only need a few GBs of data rather than 100GB+!
We also exceptionally like the file preview option, so you can check if the files you have found are the ones you want to restore. Cisdem Data Recovery works with all recent versions of macOS. It is definitely a good Mac data recovery tool worth considering if you’re dealing with recovering precious data.
Price: $69.95~$149.95
Platform: macOS Sonoma and earlier
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Taking all things into consideration, Cisdem Data Recovery is an efficient and user-friendly application for the Mac that can help you deal with the awful situations when you have lost precious files, regardless of what storage device they were on. --- Softpedia
Cisdem DataRecovery Mac hard drive recovery software is inexpensive and has fast scanning and recovery speeds. It does a great job recovering image files. --- Business
Free Download
You can also refer to the following YouTube video to recover lost files with Cisdem.
Disk Drill is a feature-rich disk utility tool to monitor, protect, backup, clean up, remove, erase and recover data on Mac. There are 4 data recovery methods in Disk Drill: deep scan, quick scan, allocate existing data and scan for lost HFS+ partition. Users can recover data from Mac internal and external disks, also recover files from mobile devices.
Price: $89 for single user, $499 for enterprise
Platforms: macOS X 10.5+
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You’re allowed to get a customizable Mac file recovery with Stellar Data Recovery Professional software. It’s capable of scanning certain types of file as you wish, like documents, emails, videos, audios and photos. Also, you can choose to scan everything from your device. Stellar belongs to a popular name in data recovery, overall ensuring a relatively stable performance.
Price: $89.99 per year
Platforms: macOS 13 and lower
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Wondershare Recoverit Data Recovery provides an enhanced recovery feature to restore your lost videos or photos from all devices, such as Canon, Sony, DJI, GoPro, Seagate and SD card. It also offers versions for Windows and Linux. Its clear interface and wide range of features give beginners the effective and simple recovery experience.
Price: $89.99 per year
Platforms: macOS 13 and lower
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Data Rescue offers 4 options to deal with data loss: scan drive and recover files, view previous scan results and recover from Data Rescue, duplicate failing drive to a healthy drive, and create recovery drive to safely recover files. These options make a high recovery rate and give users more freedom to recover files lost under different situations. It additionally supports RAID recovery and allows erasing files
Price: $399.96 for full license
Platforms: Windows and macOS
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Gearing toward data recovery professionals, R-Studio for Mac boasts an assortment of advanced features like virtual RAID, network recovery and disk imaging, but accordingly is not that easy-to-use for regular home users. Analysts will love it for its powerful ability on data analysis and statistical modeling.
Price: $79.99 for one user, $143.99 for corporate
Platforms: macOS 12 Monterey or earlier
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Tenorshare 4DDiG Data Recovery for Mac always offers an instant data loss solution for beginners and veterans. Compared to other competitors, this software will take less time for you to regain your lost Mac files with its easy-to-follow 3-step recovery process. You can get free scanning and preview of recoverable files, but need to pay for a subscription to rescue items back.
Price: $89.95 per month, $109.95 per year, $169.95 lifetime
Platforms: macOS 10.12 and above
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iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac has been designed for recovering files from external encrypted disks as well as unreadable drives and memory cards. One obvious shortage is that iBoysoft has no option to preview music or video files, which will lead to inconvenience when you’d like to locate the desired music and video files in a efficient manner.
Price: $89.95 per month, $99.95 per year
Platforms: macOS and Mac OS X
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By utilizing UFS Explorer Standard Recovery software, you have to go through 4 steps before finally getting back the lost data on Mac. They’re Storage to scan, File systems to search, Recovery by content and Run the scan. It’s suggested to do the free trial of Mac data recovery before deciding to purchase any of its licenses, to make sure that this software exactly matches your requirements.
Price: $64.95 for personal, $129.95 for commercial, $189.95 for corporate
Platforms: macOS 10.15 and above
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Data recovery is a challenging task, even the best data recovery software cannot guarantee a 100% recovery rate, let alone free data recovery tools. Therefore, most of the time data recovery software claims to be free may be just a trick from a data recovery program developer, trying to have you purchase a license to recover the data found by their free data recovery software. But some open source data recovery tools are truly for free and allow to access to their full features. As follows the best 6 pieces of free Mac data recovery software will be unmasked.
PhotoRec may be misunderstood as a data recovery program to recover photos only, while it is not. It is developed by cgsecurity, which is a personal website, helps users to recover lost photos, videos, archives, documents and 400+ types of file on Mac. Users can utilize all its full features and recover all found items. However, it is not user friendly because it uses command lines to run the program for recovery process.
Platforms: macOS 10.6+
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TestDisk comes in the same installation package with PhotoRec, but these 2 companions don’t perform equally in every aspects. PhotoRec focus on lost file recovery on your drives or other storage sources, while TestDisk is good at bringing back corrupted partitions and further repairing disks. TestDisk is also a data recovery utility based on command lines. Being reliable and secure, public can feel assured to use it.
Platforms: macOS 10.6+
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Yes, this software is just called Free Mac Data Recovery. Developed by Thundersoft, this utility sets itself apart from other Mac data recovery applications by being absolutely free. It’s not a multi-feature tool though, its major purpose is to recover users’ lost data from Mac computer. Non-techie users will not get confused thanks to its easy install process and simple UI.
Platforms: macOS
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DMDE, short for DM Disk Editor and Data Recovery Software, has a free edition armed with useful features including file recovery, disk editor, simple partition manager, RAID constructor and disk imaging. The free version is only accessible to personal users. Data recovery is limited to 4000 files at one time, but there’s no limit on how many files to recover if they’re divided into batches of 4000.
Platforms: macOS
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Suppose you just need to recover JPEG images from Mac, Exif Untrasher will be highly recommended. This is a Mac data recovery program aiming to bring back JPEG images from digital cameras’ memory cards or memory sticks. Surely it’s unable to support other image formats and file types. To do the image file recovery, select a volume or disk image as data source, choose the destination folder to save the recovered images and start the data recovery.
Platforms: macOS 10.6 or higher
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Specially designed for macOS system environment, Lazesoft Mac Data Recovery is a real freeware to offer unlimited recovery without one penny. It has 4 Recovery Modes: Fast Scan, Undelete, Unformat and Deep Scan, from which you’re free to choose to suit your needs. One downside of this freeware is that it can’t work properly sometimes since the version is old.
Platforms: macOS 10.5 or later
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As a piece of best data recovery software for Mac, it should have capabilities as below:
If you can't recover data from your Mac or other drives with a data recovery tool, then you can consider getting it back by an in-lab service. In-lab data recovery services are always at high price, but it worth a try when data recovery software fails. There are many professional data recovery service providers like Secure, Seagate, Kroll Ontrack, Data Rescue, etc.
To recover your data by in-lab data recovery service, first you’d better contact with the provider to know how much it will cost. And you need to delivery your device to the provider if you can accept the price. At last, wait for the provider to recover your data and send back the device.
Last but not least, backup your important files regularly. There are many ways to backup your files. You can backup them to Time Machine drive or external drive. Cloud storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive can also be used to backup important data online. Thus, you can always get lost files back without the help of data recovery software or services.
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.
Jenny
To be honest, though free data recovery tools are free, they do have many limitations. Like their operations are too complicated for beginners, low recovery rate, slow scanning speed... In such a case, obviously, paid programs have their own advantages. This post talks across the board.
Bennett
I have ever used Easeus (almost $90). It seems that your Cisdem recovery tool is much cheaper.
Megan Charles
Yes. The price of Cisdem DataRecovery for Mac is the most competitive in the market.
L.Hughes
Is the Cisdem program workable to Windows 7?
Megan Charles
Hi, L.Hughes. I'm afraid not. It is especially-designed for Macs.
michaelyoussef
i need this program
michael
i need it
Perry
Comprehensive article. I will try Cisdem DataRecovery and I will read other articles. Keep on.
Danny Heppner
I deleted my data by accident and I ask help for Google, and I found this article from it. I read it and tried Cisdem DataRecovery for Mac. It is powerful!!! Now my data is recovered. Thank you!!!
Albert
Final Verdict is useful, it means that writer had tested 3 data recovery software. Maybe Cisdem DataRecovery is a good choice, I will try.