Best Mac data recovery apps to bring back your lost and deleted files

Recover lost data in 3 simple steps: automated scan, preview, and one-click recovery. Cover any file format and deal with data loss issues. Undelete files from the Mac-based hard drive, fusion drive, SSD, USB drive, memory card, digital camera, and more. Macworld recommended, and a great choice for both Mac and Windows users.

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Recoverit by Wondershare is centered around the usual modules that you might see in this kind of suite: Hard Drives and Locations and SD Card for file recovery, Enhanced Recovery and Corrupted Video Repair for video and photo restoration and System Crashed Computer and NAS and Linux for additional recovery features. 

There’s a friendly home screen and user interface and the modules work as expected. Data recovery for hard drives, locations, and SD cards is simple and reliable, with Recoverit executing both a quick scan and diving into a deep scan.

The video and photo repair modules work well with damaged files. The SD Card module was able to sift through a damaged 8GB SD card, pull some video data thought lost, and deliver the data back cleanly to a recovery folder without issue.

Remote-based utilities allow for network-based drives to be located or accessed manually to have data recovered from them. The program can also save recovered data to a NAS drive or Google Drive, which is a nice feature.

We had some problems with the USB boot drive creation module, but this might be due to Apple’s complications. 

Wondershare Recoverit presents an excellent data recovery package at a not-unreasonable, price. The company also offers discounts for students and educators, and small and medium businesses. While no trial version exists, the free version allows for all of Recoverit’s features to be used, with data recovery capped at 100 megabytes.

Stellar Data Recovery for Mac focuses on recovering data via standard scans, deep scans, drive image creation, and other recovery tools. It is available as a free trial, with standard, professional, and premium editions available on yearly or lifetime contracts. The software supports both HFS+ and APFS volume formats and can be installed easily.

Stellar Data Recovery’s main strength is its extensive data recovery engine, which supports hundreds of file formats and allows users to search and recover by file type, headers, and attributes. It also features a good scan management engine that allows users to save and work from previous scans, and an image creation feature that allows users to create a byte-for-byte image of a volume that can be restored later.

One interesting feature is the Recover Non Booting Mac module, which allows users to log into their Mac’s recovery partition, load Terminal, and enter a command to open a remote version of Stellar Data Recovery (more details in our full review). Other modules such as Search Large Files and Search Duplicate Files perform well and provide a comprehensive look at your drive.

The complete array of modules worked well with test drives, recovering data as needed, and snagging as much as possible.

Unfortunately, we did experience some problems. Stellar’s Clean Up Junk Files crashed the application repeatedly and had to be force quit. 

Other issues included activating the serial number, which took several days and multiple calls and emails to sort out. Additionally, Stellar Data Recovery refused to appear in the macOS Recent Items menu, preventing it from being quickly launched. Even after activating a Professional tier account, the software still presents an “Upgrade” button on its main menu, which seems to be asking for more money to be thrown in the company’s general direction.

Despite these failings, Stellar Data Recovery for Mac is a good program able to dig deep to help reconstruct and recover deleted data. There’s also Stellar Data Recovery for iPhone.

Data Rescue offers some excellent drive management and data recovery features, albeit at a steep price for occasional users.

The software supports older versions of macOS and requires macOS 10.12 (Sierra) or later. Users can download the software and assign full drive access, with a trial offering up to 1GB of data recovery for free. The company offers a 30-day standard license as well as a pricy professional license.

The software has a compelling toolset, including Quick Scan or Deep Scan, view hex tables, secure erase, set drive parameters, manage virtual RAID setup, and work with numbered sectors on drives and allocation blocks. It allows users to work with up to 15 scans, pausing and resuming as needed – handy if you’re several hours into a Deep Scan. The software runs well in the background.

Data Rescue 6 can create clone and recovery drives, handling different data strategies such as Straight, Reverse, Bisect, and Segment. However, it does not offer an option to create a macOS Sonoma recovery drive as of July 2024.

There are other limitations. If the drive is mechanically failing, it’ll be harder for data to be pulled and reconstructed. 

Technical tools in Data Rescue 6 offer plenty to work with, but can get you in trouble if you aren’t familiar with them. For example, setting the wrong drive parameters or boot point can require troubleshooting.

Overall, Data Rescue 6 offers excellent tools, but Prosoft should address issues like lack of customer responsiveness, the lengthy time between updates, the high, subscription-based price tag, and a lack of a tutorial system. 

Disk Drill Pro from Cleverfiles is designed to recover data and rebuild deleted files on Macs and various other platforms and devices. It works with standard macOS file formats like HFS+, Mac OS Extended, and APFS. 

The basic version is available for free and can recover up to 500 megabytes of data. There’s a Pro version that supports one user and up to three simultaneous activations, paid for once with an additional expense for lifetime upgrades. The Enterprise edition has a similar extra expense for lifetime upgrades and supports 10 users and infinite activations with priority technical support and DFXML forensic data support.

Disk Drill Pro requires macOS 10.15 Catalina or later and offers several new features, including a RAID utility, NAS & Linux via SSH utility, tools for recovering data from iPhones, iPads, and Time Machine volumes, a scan session manager, S.M.A.R.T. monitoring, a macOS boot drive creator, a backup utility, a Clean Up utility to map drive storage, a duplicate file remover, a data shredder, and a free space erasure tool. YouTube-based tutorial videos are available.

Devices can be scanned over a Wi-Fi network, and the S.M.A.R.T. function provides data about drive temperatures, drive condition, and life percentage left. Disk Drill Pro runs the scan in the background and can bypass file permission errors on the data being erased. During our data recovery scans, more than 90% of deleted files were readily recovered. 

Disk Drill Pro has some issues, such as the macOS Installer utility failing to produce a bootable volume after multiple tests, the Recent Sessions scan manager only sporadically working, and Disk Drill Pro crashing into the spinning rainbow wheel if a process is interrupted. However, it offers reliable data recovery from a wide variety of devices.

EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac is a Mac port of the Windows recovery software.

There is a free version with a decent 2GB recovered data cap as well as a paid version, which offers additional features such as 1-on-1 remote assistance, is available as a free trial, and requires Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) or later to run. The paid version offers one license for one Mac paid monthly, yearly or as a lifetime upgrade plan that covers one Mac. The monthly and annual license payments auto-renew.

The software supports over 1,000 file types and offers specific modules for SD cards, cloud-based recovery, and storage. It supports APFS, HFS+, HFS, XFAT, FAT16, FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS, making it useful for working with drives from Windows and Linux machines.

The core functionalities of data recovery, reconstruction, and organization are its strongest points. A friendly interface guides users in choosing the volume to recover from and designating the target restoration drive or folder. The program organizes recovered and restored data logically into categories such as All Types, Pictures, Documents, Audio, Videos, Emails, Archives, and Others.

The SD Card function is useful, and the iCloud module makes it easy to log into iCloud (requiring Two Factor Authentication). The Video Repair module is enjoyable for exporting cleaner copies of old videos. However, some issues need attention, including the Unbootable Mac module, which has the user shut down their Mac, boot into Recovery Mode, then boot off an external server run by EaseUS. While this is a good idea in theory, the tool went into a continuous loop of being unable to mount my M2 Mac internal and external drives. I allowed this process to run overnight, and when I woke up in the morning, the drives had still not mounted and the tool could not be worked with. 

The cloud tool was unable to successfully log into Dropbox for recovery, and the application required an administrator password every time the user launched it. Additionally, the software presented a customer feedback survey every time the user exited the program, which was infuriating.

Data Recovery Wizard for Mac excels at its core functions and presents an attractive means of recovering data from Mac, Windows, and Linux volumes with a nice array of platform and file format support. However, the high price point, Unbootable Mac module failures, constant need for an administrator password, and repeating customer feedback survey window let it down.

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iBeesoft’s Data Recovery for Mac functions as a data recovery and backup application and also includes a video repair utility for the AV nerds out there.

The app is based around several modules: Storage Devices, Crashed Mac Recovery, Video Repair, File Backup, and Search Records. There’s a user-friendly interface and helpful file categorizations, such as All Types, Pictures, Documents, Audio, Video, Emails, Archives, Others, and Unsaved Documents.

The software can scan through your list of mounted drives, looking for deleted files, reconstructing and recovering everything it can. It’s easy to select specific files or all files for a given recovery to an external volume once a scan is complete.

The Video Repair module allows you to drag and drop old video clips and upgrade their quality before exporting them. The Backup module allows you to specify files, folders, or an entire volume and back up a copy as a .dmg file, which can be easily restored later.

This is so far so good, but there are some elements to sort out. The Crashed Mac module is designed to offer an easily downloadable .dmg file to create a boot drive to use as an emergency disk to help recover data to an external hard drive, but the web server that hosted the file not working so the feature couldn’t be tested.

There’s a Personal License and a Lifetime License, as well as a free version (with a 500MB limit).

Data Recovery for Mac hones in on its core features well and is worth a look.

Alsoft has been producing high-quality utility software for over 20 years. DiskWarrior, a popular application for recovering damaged hard drives, has been in use since 1998. However, the latest version of DiskWarrior 5.3.1, released in 2024, seems to be falling behind in software and file system support. 

The software still supports the HFS+ format, FireVault 1 and 2, Core Storage for Fusion dries, RAID configurations, and disk images and sparse bundles, but it has not been upgraded to support the APFS format, which is increasingly prevalent on new Macs and Apple’s push towards this file system standard.

DiskWarrior is available as a bootable USB flash drive that can boot Macs running HFS+ format volumes. Its ease of use remains unchanged, making it easy to mount and unmount drives and volumes, perform quick tests, access technical specifications, set up automated diagnostics, and receive notifications through alerts, emails, AppleScript programs, or text messages.

However, there’s bad news: DiskWarrior 5.3.1 still lacks support for the APFS standard. As more drives are moving towards this file system, the company’s silence on this matter is concerning. A representative within the company confirmed that Alsoft is working on version 6.0, which will offer full APFS support. However, changes from Apple’s side, such as not allowing third-party kernel extensions and other technical changes, have made the development process more difficult and created more roadblocks than previous versions of DiskWarrior.

The lack of a free trial version of DiskWarrior 5.3.1 raises concerns about the steep new user price and upgrade price, especially when the software lacks APFS support and can only work with certain volumes.

Sometimes a great utility gets stuck in development. There’s still a great application to be had here, but Alsoft needs to put itself in a position where it can readily announce that an updated version will be out at a given date and that it will offer APFS support.

Expect the data recovery process to be time-consuming as the app pieces the bits of files back together. With patience, most files that haven’t been overwritten should, in theory, be saveable.

Some drives can take days to fully scan, and the higher capacity they are, the longer the process. But if it’s irreplaceable photos or important documents that are lost, you can afford to wait.

Unfortunately, this sort of software is pretty much always going to have a high price associated with it before you can recover what you need–but if you’ve lost hundreds of treasured photos or the first 1,000 pages of your novel, then no price is too high, probably. Sometimes you can pay for the software for a month, do what you need to do and then cancel. Sometimes you must subscribe for a year. Other options allow you to buy it outright, but pay extra for future updates. Your own circumstances will influence which option is best for you. Additionally, many of these tools offer a trial so you can at least see what you should be able to recover before you spend your money.

There are a few techniques you can try before you spend money on an app though, as you’ll see in our How to recover data from a damaged Mac article.

Yes, they are safe, but you’re going to want to do some research and/or read some reviews to find something that works best for you. It does the software companies no good to have their data recovery software be something that damages your Mac’s data, and data recovery applications use extremely low-level hardware code to access data from failing devices, so there’s that to consider.

Still, there are several data recovery applications that offer free or trial periods to test the software, and you can always try these out for yourself. Read and listen to trusted sources, try various applications out for yourself (you can always try recovering data you’ve deleted from thumb drives with the trial versions of these applications), remember to set up Time Machine and online backups and your data should be safe. There’s a world of options out there and we’ll do what we can to help you find the best one for you.

Most data recovery software works to mount the potentially-failing volume that your data is on, then it has to work to keep it mounted and running as it scans the drive’s sectors, offers you options as to what you’d like to do with it, carries out the tests and data recovery options, and works to save the data to a functional drive prior to reconstructing it.

There’s a lot for it to carry out, and each data recovery application and the company behind it approaches it differently. Some might provide a very general, user friendly interface towards data recovery while others might offer extremely specific, technical functions to work with precise sectors of your hard drive. Some might provide an option to boot form an external USB thumb drive or Web-based operating system to try to recover your data, and each approach can yield different results

Data recovery software has always been infamously expensive, but there are logical reasons for this. First, there’s an extremely significant amount of research and development involved in creating and updating this software, as it delves into low-lying system and firmware functions as to how the computer communicates with its hard drives and reads and writes data to and from them.

Additionally, data recovery software typically isn’t the kind of thing that’s initially purchased with a new computer (such as a copy of Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc.), and tends to only be purchased in the event of a disaster wherein your data is at risk of loss.

As such, the data recovery software market tends to sell fewer copies and sometimes charges a higher price for the copies it does sell.

Finally, there are times where the software companies provide higher-end services and tech support, including shipping a damaged drive off for disassembly and data recovery. This can be considered a new service altogether and that much more expensive to reclaim damaged data.