How to recover deleted music photos and documents on Mac for free

You or your family may accidently delete some important files and documents from your Mac (or an SD Card connected to your Mac, or an external drive connected to your Mac etc), and this step by step guide will show you how to recover the deleted files on Mac for free. It's easy to understand even you are a Mac newbie can handle with it.

The tool you need is Disk Drill, it is a new Mac Data Recovery Software, recovers data from HFS/HFS+, FAT, NTFS and other file systems right from your Mac. Disk Drill is in beta now, you can use it for free and safe. Once the beta period ends, the beta version(s) will still work. Now, let's start the guide.

Go to Disk Drill website and download it, uncompress the downloaded file and drag the app to your Applications folder. Launch Disk Drill from there. The installation is straight forward, just click Yes and OK. Of course, you must have the administrative password to run the installation.

Now, it's time to recover those deleted files! Click the large Recover button from the main Disk Drill window.

You'll be presented with a list of all the disks (hard drives, external hard drives, SD Cards etc) currently connected to your Mac. Select the one that you want to recover files from.

Depending on the disk type, you may need to further drill down the exact partition or section of the disk you want to search/recover. In this tutorial, I took my digital camera SD card as example to recover files. Disk Drill recognizes that this card is either FAT32 or NTFS, so all that's required is to click the Quick scan button. NOTE: if a Quick scan cannot recover your files, you can come back and do a much more in depth (and time consuming) Deep Scan.

Disk Drill will now run a scan of your selected disk.

Then a list of all the possibly recoverable files and folders will be displayed. Place a check in the box next to each file/folder that you want to restore.

Now select the pull-down menu titled Choose Folder… in the We are able to recover selected files to: section.

As indicated in the message displayed in the 'save files to' window, it's a very, very good idea to recover the files to a different disk/drive than the one that the files are being recovered from. In my example I'm recovering files from an SD Card, so I opted to restore those files to my Mac's hard drive - a different disk - to maximize the possibility of the files being successfully recovered.

Click the Recover button when you're ready.

Just sit back and let Disk Drill do its thing. Depending on the size of the disk/drive, this process can take a while. Once Disk Drill has finished the recovery process, it will display a window with the ‘results'. Click the Destination folder button to open a Finder window directly to the place where the files were restored to (the location you specified above).

That's all; it couldn't be easier to recover deleted files with Disk Drill. If Disk Drill wasn't able to recover your files, restart the process and this time select Deep scan (step #4 above). This  option will increase the scan time significantly, but also increase the opportunity to recover your lost files. Enjoy my guide.