Question from Marie N.: I have an urgent question and I really hope you’ll have an answer for me.
I accidentally formatted the external USB hard drive that I use to store all of my scanned family photos with my Mac.
I meant to format the drive I use to store my Mac backups but I accidentally plugged in the wrong drive!
I hope you can help me recover my pics from it?
I know this drive had to have been originally formatted with my Windows laptop because that’s the computer I used to scan the pictures.
I can plug the drive into my Mac and it works but I can’t find any of my files on it. Is there any way to recover them?
The thought of losing these files sickens me because I worked for over a month scanning them all.
And the worst thing of all is the original pictures can’t be scanned again because almost all of them were lost when my sister’s house burned down.
I’m really desperate here. Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated.
Rick’s answer: Marie, I believe your best course of action is to try using a data recovery tool like Recuva to retrieve as many of the lost files as possible and then simply reformat the drive with your Windows laptop when you’re finished.
Recuva will scan the drive and search for any and all files that are still intact and allow you to copy them onto a different drive.
I can tell you that this tool works extremely well. In fact, I’ve used it to successfully recover files from drives that had their file systems completely trashed!
Bottom line: I recommend that you download the free version of Recuva and give it a try. You’ve likely lost at least some of your files forever but you just might be pleasantly surprised by the results overall.
I hope this helps, Marie. Good luck!
Update from Marie: I scanned the drive with Recuva and it was able to retrieve over 3000 of my photos! What an awesome program! I was so happy with it that I went back and bought the Professional version!
Thank you so much for your help!!!
Bonus tip: Click here for simple instructions for backing up your Windows PC to an external hard drive.
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