If you can’t find files on your USB drive or you have accidentally deleted all data, you can restore it from a backup. But unless you’re making backups there is no other way to get this data back except using recovering software. And today we’ll show you how easily you can restore your data on a USB drive (your hard drive or other media) with the help of Disk Drill.
First of all you should know that Disk Drill can recover data on a USB drive in case it can be mounted into Mac.
The steps are simple:
- Download Disk Drill and drag it into your Applications folder. During the first-time launch you’ll be prompted for an admin password to install the driver (it is the necessary step for a correct USB data recovery).
- Connect your USB flash drive to a Mac and select “Recover” option in a welcome screen that appears.
- Choose your USB drive from the list and select scanning method. Quick Scanning method is less thorough but makes recovery quick. Deep Scan analyzes every bit of the disk in a binary mode. It takes much more time but in most cases it is the only recovery option.Depending on the disk size, the number the files lost, the state of the media, etc. the data analyzing process might take up to several hours.
- The result is the list of the files available for recovery. You can use a filter to speed up the review of the items and, most importantly, a Preview option to make sure the file is that you need. If Disk Drill can open the file for preview, it means that the file can be recovered! To do that select the file(s) and hit the “Recover” button. Wait until all the recovered files are copied to the new destination.
Tip: to prevent losing your data during recovery make sure that the target destination for the rescued files is not the USB drive you are trying to recover from.
In some cases the recovered files can be corrupted. This happens when the the part of the file was overwritten by another application. Unfortunately there is no way to prevent this but Disk Drill will try hard 🙂
PS: This article is about Disk Drill 1.x, we will update it to reflect all the awesome improvements in Disk Drill 2 asap.