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Photorec Data Recovery Tool For Mac Os X

Last updated: Apr. 13, 2018

Are you looking for Recuva to recover deleted or lost files on a Mac? Be aware that there is NOT a Mac version for Recuva, yet.

PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives. TestDisk is powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again.

Websites and advertisements that claim to provide Recuva downloads for macOS are either false or misleading.

I love Recuva and I appreciate the Piriform team (also the maker of the world's famous PC cleaning tool called CCleaner) for providing this free excellent utility. With Recuva, I managed to help a photographer friend recover tons of 'deleted' pictures.

TestDisk and PhotoRec are two, free, open-source data recovery tools. They are both offered in a single archive. To avoid confusion, we decided to create a single page for both software titles.
Although PhotoRec is an excellent recovery tool, its shortcomings mean that other photo recovery software programs need to be tried for getting back deleted photos and documents. Wondershare Data Recovery is one of the alternative software for PhotoRec that is compatible with both Windows and Mac OS X.
File recovery tools work on the idea that, the data may still be physically present on the storage device. These File recovery tools scan through the storage device to see if it can find any files physically still on the device and recover them.

Unfortunately, Recuva, like many other data recovery software we tested, is only available to download and use on a Windows PC.

However, several free Mac file recovery apps are good enough to be alternatives of Recuva. In this article, I'm going to share them with you. I'll also show you how to use them step by step.

My goal is simple: to help you get back those lost files quick — without wasting time or money on software offered by 'unethical' vendors that provide false information.

Note: I'm not against paid programs, I just dislike their marketing tactics. In fact, there are quite a few good commercial apps. See our best Mac data recovery software review.

Quick Navigation

What is Recuva?

For those of you who are new to the program, Recuva (like the name indicates) is a free recovery tool that runs on Windows-based computers to help users undelete files accidentally erased from a computer or storage media such as digital camera, memory card, USB flash drive, external hard drive, and so on.

The program is designed and developed by a company called Piriform, a privately owned software company based in London, UK. You can get Recuva for free here.

Recuva for macOS?

As I said, Recuva is ONLY available for Windows operating system. Piriform claims it's compatible with Windows 10, 8.1, 7, Vista and XP (both 32-bit and 64-bit). Here's how its main interface looks like on a PC.

Note: there isn't a macOS version yet, thus you can't run Recuva on aMac machine.

Many advertisers claim they offer Recuva for macOS. I tried a few and found that none of them have anything to do with Piriform Recuva — they all turned out to be commercial software that require pay to activate the recovery function. Worse yet, some even are not compatible with the latest macOS version i.e. High Sierra as of 2018.

Three Great Recuva Alternatives for Mac (Recovery Tutorials Included)

Please note:

The 3 Mac recovery apps listed below are all 100% free to download and use -- meaning you can use them without any restrictions.

If they didn't work out, you may turn to commercial recovery software if the lost files are really important to you. Consider Stellar Mac Data Recovery, Remo Recover Mac, Data Rescue for Mac, and Disk Warrior, more details about those apps below.

1. Time Machine

Ah, Time Machine — saved my life several times. If you are new to the Mac world, Time Machine is a backup app built into macOS by default. It works with Apple Time Capsule or an external hard drive to save copies of all the data stored on your Mac computer.

Best to use for: restoring deleted or lost files on Mac, provided that you have a least one timely backup before your files got deleted.

Pros:

Easy and quick to set up.
Reliable. You recover almost any files as long as you have proper backups.

Cons:

Does not support recovering lost data from an external storage device.

How-to Tutorial:

Apple has a thorough step-by-step instruction on how to use Time Machine to backup and restore data. As long as you have backed up your Mac before, it's almost guaranteed that you can restore any individual files or the whole Mac.

If you prefer a video tutorial, check out this 2-minute clip:

2. Exif Untrasher

Another great alternative to Recuva for Mac users. Exif Untrasher is an app that is able to locate deleted photos (JPEG format only) on any external storage media such as SD/CF cards, memory sticks, USB drives, external hard drives, etc. and retrieve the pictures back to your Mac. Exif Untrasher performs read-only operations and does not alter your removable drive. Thus it's pretty safe to use. The app is compatible with Mac OS X 10.6 or higher.

Best to use for: recovering JPEG pictures lost due to accidental deletion, disk formatting, memory card crash, etc.

Pros:

It's free.
Easy to set up, and the app interface is intuitive.
Quality of recovered photos is high.

Cons:

Does not support scanning internal Mac hard drive.
Only JPEG format is supported, no camera RAW images or other video formats.
Disk scanning process is slow. It took me an hour to scan a 32GB Lexar drive.

How-to Tutorial:

Step 1: Connect your device (e.g. a camera memory card) to your Mac. I'm here to use a Lexar flash drive as an example.

Step 2: Go to Exif Untrasher's official website. Download and install the app on your Mac.

Step 3: Launch Exif Untrasher. Choose the Source (the disk volume for the scan) and Destination folder (to save recovered items).

Step 4: Once I click the Choose Source button, it asks me to choose the volume that represents the storage medium I want to scan. The app recognizes my Lexar flash drive. Notice the 'Macintosh HD' is grayed out? Because it does not support internal Mac hard drive.

Step 5: After I select my Lexar drive and click OK. It will create a disk image (named 'Lexar (Copy).dmg').

Step 6: Now the disk image is being created.

Step 7: Soon I can click the 'Start data recovery' button on the main window.

Step 8: Now it's the time-consuming part. Since my Lexar USB key has 32GB volume, seems too large for Exif Untrasher to scan. It took me about an hour or so to finish the process.

Step 9: When Exif Untrasher completes restoration, it will inform you and automatically open the destination folder you selected in Step 3. Now take a closer look at the folder to see if your lost pictures are there.

3. PhotoRec

Don't be fooled by the name. PhotoRec is actually a powerful data recovery software that is capable of retrieving a variety of file formats including photos, videos, documents, archives, and more. It's open source program available to download and use on multiple operating systems like Windows, macOS, and Linux. Together with its companion program called TestDisk which can be used to fix disk partition issues, the software has a very good word of mouth among computer geeks.

Best to use for: those who are comfortable with operating via Terminal (yes, it's a command line tool) to rescue deleted or lost files.

Pros:

It's open source program, totally free.
Support recovering various types of files from both Mac hard drive and external storage devices.
The scanning and recovery process is relatively quick.

Photorec Data Recovery Tool For Mac