The best free data recovery software for Mac available online is described below. These five applications vary in their characteristics. However, all share one commonality, they are free, and therefore useful for the casual user.
Measuring the speed of your hard drive is the easiest benchmarking process around, and the best tool I’ve found for that task is the BlackMagic Disk Speed Test by BlackMagic Design. Disk Expert allows you to locate unneeded files and folders quickly using Mac OS X system tools. You can look for a file using Finder tab and preview the file using QuickLook. Disk Expert lets you gather files and folders into collection, enabling you to rapidly move them to another place, or even delete them. It is present in most recent versions of MacOS and is a very useful tool for monitoring CPU usage and other stats. Monitor CPU usage on Mac. This can be useful if you see 100% disk utilization errors. This article describes some of the commonly used features of Activity Monitor, a kind of task manager that allows you see how apps and other processes are affecting your CPU, memory, energy, disk, and network usage. Disk Expert is a disk space analyzer which helps you to quickly free up space on Mac when your Startup Disk is almost full. The application scans any hard drives and even hidden system files, and shows you what is taking up the most space on your disk.
This article is fully updated and valid for the latest macOS Mojave
1. Disk Drill
Disk Drill is the free top data recovery app for Mac OS X. Disk Drill Basic, in addition to having previewing capabilities for recovered files, contains several other functionalities, such as Recovery Vault and Guaranteed Recovery, lost partition restoration, boot disk maker and so on, which make it one of the best Mac data recovery software applications available.
Disk Drill works on internal and external hard drives, USB flash drives, SD cards and many other appliances that can be connected to a Mac, including iOS and Android devices. Its last version has an extensive database of file signatures that can be restored from drives even after formatting and uses very efficient and fast scanning algorithms.
Disk Drill is constantly updated and supported by its ever-growing team and covers cases of data corruption resulting from loss of power, or removal of a device without first unmounting it.
Data recovery for free
Your Companion for Deleted Files Recovery
Your Companion for Deleted Files Recovery
High Disk Utilization
Free Features:
#1 Recovery Vault is an advanced extra layer to the Trash Bin that keeps a reference to deleted data.
#2 Guaranteed Recovery is a background service that saves a copy of each file to a user-specified folder. Both data protection modules substantially reduce the possibilities of permanently losing critical data.
#3Data Backup feature provides users with the ability to recover lost data from a byte-to-byte clone version of the device/partition, without having to risk the original storage source.
#4 In addition to that, multiple extra tools like Duplicate File Finder, Disk Health Monitor, Disk Space Analyzer, Emergency Recovery Boot Drive, are available for free.
The user interface is very friendly, and the Pro version includes an effective support service and a lifetime-upgrade option that covers every new version. Disk Drill successfully manages the balance of essential and advanced features for the casual, professional and enterprise users alike, that makes it worth the money spent on the upgrade. There’s something in Disk Drill for Mac Enterprise that even forensic experts and law enforcement organizations will find useful.
2. PhotoRec
PhotoRec is not the most powerful free Mac data recovery tool, but it has the advantage of being open source. This basically means that not only the application but also the source code is available to the public.
PhotoRec can work with OS X, Linux, Free BSD, Net BSD, Open BSD, and Windows. It can recover the most common file formats, such as JPEG pictures, MP3 audio files, OpenDocument and Microsoft Office files, PDF documents and ZIP archives. Files can be recovered from different devices such as digital camera memory cards, USB flash drives and hard disks.
Free Features:
This free file recovery Mac app uses a powerful technology known as file carving. This method consists of two steps. Firstly, it searches for the data block or cluster size. If the file system is not corrupted, this value is obtained from the superblock (ext2/ext3/ext4) or volume boot record (FAT, NTFS). If this is not possible, the app checks each sector of the device, and using the first ten files found, it calculates the block or cluster size.
Secondly, the app reads the device, block by block/cluster by cluster, checking against the different file signatures available in the app’s database, thus assembling and recuperating the available files. Though it’s unclear how many of those file signatures are known to the app.
Overall, it is a nice tool to use when in need to recover some personal files, without having to resort to a professional application.
3. EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac
EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard is another one of the best data recovery Mac software applications. The developer has released three different versions: free, Pro and unlimited.
Free Features:
Disk Usage Visualizer Mac
The free version is limited to a maximum of 2GB of restored data. This free data recovery software can recover data from Mac notebooks, desktops, hard drives, USB drives, SD cards, memory cards, digital cameras, etc. It works on internal HFS+ drives, and on FAT/FAT32 file systems used in USB flash drives and external hard drives connected to an Apple computer.
Easeus tool recovers file formats most commonly used in image, video, music and document files. It is mostly designed for recovering lost files due to unintentional deletes or drive formatting.
Summarizing, EaseUs free data recovery tool is a handy app designed for casual unintentional file deletions.
4. Softtote Mac Data Recovery
Softtote’s app can recover lost files from internal and external hard drives. File types include ONLY .bmp, .jpg, .png, .tif and .mp3. It works on devices supported by NTFS, HFS/HFS+ and FAT file systems. The application has the capacity to preview file details, such as image size and creation date before recovering them.
Just like other apps in this list, this free data recovery software Mac comes with free technical support.
In brief, Softtote’s software can be included among the best data recovery software Mac, and even though it is not so well known, it deserves a try in case of accidental file loss, but mind the limited set of supported file types.
5. MiniTool Power Data Recovery
![Mac Mac](/uploads/1/2/4/8/124819085/211958722.png)
MiniTool can recover photos, music, videos, emails, documents, and other types of data from Mac computers or other common storage devices. The free version only offers support via email.
This data recovery software for Mac works in four different modes. The first, “Undelete Recovery”, can be used to quickly recover data lost due to accidental deletion. The second, “Damaged Partition Recovery”, recovers lost data from existing partitions. The third, “Lost Partition Recovery”, recovers lost data from lost or deleted partitions, subject to success in finding them. And finally, the “Digital Media Recovery” mode, recovers multimedia files from portable storage devices.
Free Features:
This data recovery Mac software has a personal edition that is free for use only on one computer and with a maximum restore capacity of 100MB. Is that why it’s called a Mini Tool? Possibly. The developer also offers commercial, enterprise and technician editions of the software.
Overall, MiniTool offers a valid option for the casual accidental delete, in cases that don’t involve big volumes.
The Bottom Line?
We recommend going with Disk Drill, as it delivers on its data recovery odds. This awesome data recovery tool is backed up by good looks, a more intuitive user interface and a ton of free disk tools that may become handy for any user.
Over the course of writing guides to boosting Mac and hard drive speeds, I’ve discussed the incredible performance improvements Macs can get from simple upgrades — adding RAM, choosing a fast solid state drive (SSD) as an internal or external drive, and even running a simple disk optimizer tool. But there’s a common question that comes up when considering upgrades: how can you tell in advance how big of an improvement you’ll actually see?
The answer: benchmarking tools. Many apps help you measure the speed of various components of your Mac, and with a little help, you can estimate the performance jumps you’ll see after an upgrade. Below, I’ll introduce three of the best free Mac benchmarking tools, and explain how they work…
For Hard Drive Speeds: BlackMagic Disk Speed Test
Measuring the speed of your hard drive is the easiest benchmarking process around, and the best tool I’ve found for that task is the BlackMagic Disk Speed Test by BlackMagic Design. Completely free to download from the Mac App Store, this app has only a single window and very few settings to worry about. If you have only one hard drive, you can just hit the Start button after you’ve quit all of your other apps; otherwise, you can access settings by pressing the gear button between the two speedometer circles, or use the File and Stress menus at the top of the screen. Here, you can choose the right hard drive to test, and the level of stress for the testing (1GB is least, 5GB is most).
BlackMagic designed this app to help video editors determine whether their hard drives could handle various video files, ranging from basic, low-bandwidth NTSC videos to more demanding 1080p videos with higher frame rates and color depths. Unless you’re editing video, those details (summarized in the Will it Work? and How Fast? charts below the speedometers) won’t matter at all to you. You only need to focus on the two big gauges.
The drive’s Read speed is on the right, with the Write speed on the left, respectively giving you a sense of how fast apps and videos will load, and how fast things you create will be written to the drive. Speeds in the 25-30 Megabyte per second (MB/s) range are slow — what you’d expect from an external hard drive connected via USB 2.0. The same drive placed inside an iMac, or connected via USB 3.0, could reach four or five times that speed — around 100-120MB/second.
But pop an SSD like the top-selling Samsung 850 EVO I’ve recommended into the same iMac, and these are the kind of speeds you can see: around 500MB/second, five times faster than a traditional hard drive. This is the sort of speed difference that’s dramatic, instantly noticeable, and likely to really improve your day to day Mac experience. Outstanding SSD performance is the key reason Apple has switched all of its MacBook laptops away from traditional hard drives to SSDs, and is beginning the same process with its desktop machines.
For Overall Computer Performance: Geekbench 3
Although there are a bunch of different “total computer benchmarking” apps out there, the one that’s easiest to recommend is Primate Labs’ Geekbench 3, since it’s partially free, works across multiple platforms (including Macs, iOS devices, PCs, and Android devices), and lets you compare one computer’s results to other computers and other users. Like Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, Geekbench 3 is designed to be simple to use — choose one setting, make sure your other apps are closed, and hit the “Run Benchmarks” button shown above. There’s only one hitch: the free version of Geekbench 3 only runs older (“32-bit”) benchmarks on your Mac; to see the superior performance you’d get from newer (“64-bit”) apps, you’ll need the full $10 version from the Mac App Store.
I could go into a lot of detail regarding Geekbench’s results, and there are a lot of them, sorted into three main categories, each with multiple tests. But the key numbers you need to know are the big two at the top: Single-Core Score and Multi-Core Score. Compared against results from other machines, Single-Core gives you a relative sense of how fast your Mac performs under most situations, when only one processing core is handling all of the Mac’s work. Multi-Core shows you how the Mac does when it’s being pushed to its limits and all of its processing cores are sharing a bigger workload at once.
The scores above show how my 2011 four-core iMac compares to my 2013 two-core MacBook Pro; under most circumstances, they’ll feel identical (3166 is only 3% faster than 3078), but when given big tasks to perform, the four-core iMac will deliver nearly twice the performance of the two-core MacBook Pro. Your numbers will vary a little bit from test to test; running the test multiple times will give you an average.
Geekbench offers a web-based Browser that lets you compare performance between your own machines, as well as the key hardware components found in each computer. You can see above that the differences between my iMac and MacBook Pro aren’t merely in their numbers of processor cores; look closely and you’ll note that each iMac core is faster, and the iMac has more memory. On the other hand, the MacBook Pro’s processor is newer, and its memory is faster.
The critical benefit Geekbench offers is the ability to compare your results against ones submitted by other users. Doing a search of the Geekbench 3 database for, say, “iMac 27” would let you see how various 27-inch iMacs compare with your current computer. That way, if you’re going to shop for a new Mac, you can get a sense of the Single-Core and Multi-Core performance other users are getting from their machines. Do a little math (divide the new machine’s Single-Core number by your old machine’s Single-Core number) and you’ll get a sense of the performance boost. A 27″ Retina iMac with a score of 3980 would be around 26% faster than my current machine (3166) at most tasks. That’s a big jump by Mac standards, and unlike the 5%-8% benefits typically seen in annual Mac updates, one worth paying for.
Buying an all-new Mac is a big step, though, so you might prefer something simpler and cheaper, like adding extra RAM. Although that can deliver excellent performance improvements at a relatively low cost, Geekbench’s Memory test doesn’t show you the improvement you’d get from more RAM — its benchmark only shows the RAM’s raw speed, which typically can’t be improved over the top-specced RAM Apple ships in its Macs. Whatever RAM you buy as an upgrade will match the existing RAM’s speed, but the performance improvements you see will be real, including much-reduced hard disk accessing and better CPU utilization.
For Video Card Performance: Cinebench R15
Last but not least is Maxon’s Cinebench R15, a free tool that tests two things: graphics card performance using OpenGL, and CPU performance. The CPU test shown above checks how fast your computer’s main processor can render a photorealistic 3-D scene containing 2,000 objects with lights, reflections, shadows, and shaders. This test starts with a black window and fills out the image square by square over the course of several minutes; the higher the “point” total, the faster your CPU is. Like the other benchmarks, speeds in Cinebench R15 can be reduced if other apps are running.
The more distinctive benchmark is the OpenGL test, which uses three complex 3-D cars interacting on dimly-lit city streets to test your graphics card’s ability to handle nearly 1 million polygons at once with various special effects active. It’s a cool demo to watch, and the results will be displayed in frames per second (fps). My iMac hit around 68fps, versus around 23fps on my MacBook Pro. Doing a little research online, I found scores suggesting that the demo Mac Pros in Apple Stores were getting around 77fps last year.
That’s the major hitch with Cinebench: it’s hard to meaningfully compare your numbers against other Macs unless you search Google for “Cinebench R15 score” and the specific Mac you want to compare with. Maxon does include a small sampling of different OpenGL scores within a “Ranking” box, but all that tells you is that your machine (in orange) with X cores (C) and Y threads (T) running at a given GHz speed with a certain graphics card achieved Z frames per second. This isn’t “actionable information” in that you can’t do anything with it — most people won’t even be able to tell which Macs those specs pertain to. And unless you have a Mac Pro, the only current Mac with a replaceable video card, your only option to improve graphics card performance is to buy a new Mac.
My advice: if you’re interested in improving your current Mac’s performance, consider boosting the RAM and/or putting in an SSD. CPU and GPU improvements call for an all-new machine, and Geekbench is the best way to determine whether the performance differences will be meaningful enough to justify the added price.
More Great Ways To Improve Your Mac
To make the most of your Mac (or pretty much any other Apple device), I’ve written quite a few How-To and Best of guides, as well as reviews of worthwhile accessories. Read more of my guides and reviews for 9to5Mac here (and don’t forget to click on Older Posts at the bottom of the page to see everything)!