Top 15 Best Data Recovery Software for Mac OS X

Disk Drill is one of the best data recovery software applications for Mac users. It is a full-featured and comprehensive data recovery tool that offers advanced features to raise the level of data protection on your computer and peripheral devices. Using this powerful tool, you can recover files on just about any type of external media, including iOS and Android devices.

Disk Drill recognizes several hundred file types, making it the perfect choice for recovering your lost or deleted data. Photos, music files, videos, and important documents are just a few of the types of data that can be recovered with the app. You have the ability to preview the files that can be recovered before buying the full product.

The application uses a number of powerful scanning algorithms as it searches your disks for lost and damaged files. Quick scan will quickly locate files that can be recovered, and the more time-intensive Deep scan can be used on any type of disk, even one with no file system. You can limit the scanning results by choosing the file types that you are interested in recovering before initiating the process.

An easy-to-use graphic interface makes this data recovery tool simple to use. You just select the drive you are interested in recovering, click the “Recover” button, and Disk Drill will show you which files can be recovered.

Taking advantage of Disk Drill’s “Recovery Vault” and “Guaranteed Recovery” functions adds an extra level of data protection to your Mac machine. These features keep track of metadata regarding deleted files and can make recovering files deleted from the Trash bin a simple matter. Using Disk Drill in this proactive manner takes the guesswork out of recovering lost and deleted files.

Pros

• Intuitive user interface

• Great recovery rate for photos and documents

• Proactive data protection

• Extra free disk tools: disk cleanup, duplicate finder, disk health, etc.

• Free version to preview recoverable files and recover what was protected

Cons

• No telephone support

Data Rescue 5 is a data recovery tool for Mac OS X 10.10 or later. It can recover data from your hard drives as well as external drives, SD cards, solid-state drives, and other devices.

This well-known and popular data recovery software for Mac computers offers a straightforward recovery process and several unique features that make it stand out when compared with other similar software applications.

To start recovering lost data with Data Rescue 5, all you need to do is select the device you want to recover from, pick the most suitable scan type, and wait for the application to do its job. The Quick Scan option is great for recovering data from storage devices that fail to boot or mount, while Deep Scan is ideal for getting back files that have been permanently deleted.

Users of Mac OS X 10.10, 10.11,10.12, 10.13, and 10.14 can use Data Rescue 5 to create a special startup drive for simple recovery of a non-booting internal drive. Unfortunately, the developers of Data Rescue 5 are unable to support this feature in Mac OS X 10.15 and newer due to the restrictions imposed by Apple.

Customers can choose between a Standard and Professional license. The Standard license includes one system activation, and it limits recovery to five drives, while the Professional license doesn’t have any activation or recovery limits.

• Free version for previewing potential file recovery

• Email notifications

• Duplicate file recognition to save recovery space

• More expensive than some alternatives

• Recovery drive does not support Mac OS X 10.15

Even though Softtote Mac Data Recovery doesn’t support the latest version of macOS, it still deserves the attention of all Mac users who are looking for a data recovery software application that provides a guided approach to data recovery.

The next entry in our review of data recovery programs is Softtote Mac Data Recovery. This easy to use application runs on the macOS from version 10.7 through 10.14. Using this tool, you can recover files from a variety of file systems, including NTFS, HFS, HFS+, HFSX, HFS Wrapper, and FAT.

The program enables recovery on your system hard drive or most peripheral storage devices. It offers flexible file filtering to minimize scanning time and is able to recover deleted, damaged, or corrupted files in many different file formats.

Users like Softtote Mac Data Recovery because of its three recovery wizards, which do a great job of guiding through photo recovery, file recovery, and partition recovery. All recoverable files can be previewed before recovery so that you can decide which files you want to get back and which can be left behind.

By far the biggest issue with this data recovery software is the fact that it doesn’t support the latest version of macOS. This alone wouldn’t be all that bad if Softtote Mac Data Recovery was slightly cheaper. The good news is that there’s a free trial version that you can use to test what the software can do before you spend your hard-earned money on it.

• Software wizards to assist with partition, file, and photo recoveries

• Simple user interface with clear descriptions

• Above-average recovery results

• The limited set of supported file types

• Doesn’t support the latest version of macOS

M3 data recovery is free data recovery software compatible with all recent versions of macOS (from Mountain Lion to Catalina). It supports many file system formats, including encrypted APFS drives, and has the ability to recover files deleted from your Trash bin.

Regardless of if you need to retrieve lost files from a formatted hard drive or recover a lost partition, M3 Mac Data Recovery makes it easy to get the job done with just a few clicks. This Mac data recovery software comes with far more powerful features than its simple user interface suggests.

To start with, it can recover data even from encrypted APFS volumes and unreadable or unmountable drives. As long as the storage device hasn’t been damaged, you can be pretty sure that M3 Mac Data Recovery will be able to recognize it and find the data you’re looking for.

When dealing with a Mac that’s not booting up properly, you can take advantage of the option to run M3 Mac Data Recovery in macOS Recovery mode. You don’t even need to create a bootable recovery drive first because it’s possible to launch a bootable version of M3 Mac Data Recovery from the internet with a single command.

Even though M3 Mac Data Recovery provides two flexible scanning modes, we have found its recovery performance to be underwhelming, especially when recovering video and photo files. However, the recovery process itself was intuitive and easy to understand.

• Free edition allows the recovery of 1 GB of data

• Recovers data from encrypted drives

• Frequently receives new updates

• Below-average performance recovering video and photo files

• Makes you wait for the scan to finish

TechTool Pro is designed to help you test and repair a number of problematic conditions that you may experience with your Mac. Using this tool, you can perform drive testing and repair, monitor your network and connectivity, conduct memory tests, and more.

TechTool Pro is a comprehensive toolbox with a plethora of hard drive and system repair and maintenance tools. When it comes to data recovery, you’ll appreciate TechTool Pro’s Volume Rebuild tool, which can automatically repair the most common drive problems.

Because it’s always better to spot problems in their infancy, before they have a chance to cause major damage, TechTool Pro features a full testing suite that you can use to determine the health of your Mac’s hardware and your storage devices.

With TechTool Protection, you can protect important files and folders against accidental deletion by storing a complete back up of your directory structure. Should you accidentally delete an important file, TechTool Pro’s Data Recovery will be able to read this backup like a map and determine where to look to get your files back.

Included with every copy of TechTool Pro is TechTool Protogo, which makes it possible to create a bootable diagnostic device containing TechTool Pro and all of its most powerful tools for portable Mac diagnosis and recovery.

• Can recover deleted APFS files

• Offers many features beyond that of data recovery

• SMART drive check to alert you of potential drive failures

• Required to purchase additional licenses for application upgrades

• Can be difficult to control startup parameters

• Some reports of issues with the eDrive creation feature

Tenorshare UltData for Mac provides a real-time preview of the recoverable data so you can easily select which files to restore. You can recover your data with a simple three-step process that employs advanced scanning algorithms.

Tenorshare has plenty of experience with developing software applications for macOS, and they used this experience to make Tenorshare UltData for Mac one of the most user-friendly data recovery software applications available.

At its core is a simple 3-step recovery process, which anyone can figure out without an online guide or video tutorial. First, you select the storage device on which your lost data was originally located, and then you begin a scan of the selected storage device. Finally, you review the recovered files and choose those that you want to recover.

From start to finish, this whole process shouldn’t take you more than a couple of minutes, but several users have reported slow recovery performance, so your mileage may vary. Tenorshare UltData for Mac can recover around 550 file formats and preview most of them.

The latest version of this polished data recovery software fully supports macOS 10.15 Catalina. If you decide to unlock unlimited recovery, you can pay for a Tenorshare UltData for Mac subscription (monthly or annual) or purchase a lifetime license. Because the annual subscription is nearly as expensive as the lifetime license, we see absolutely no reason to spend money on it.

• Supports recovery of over 550 file formats

• Simple and intuitive interface

• Can recover iPhone data

• Does not log recovery data

• No filtering to recover specific folders or data

• Some reports of slow recovery performance

• Doesn’t support NTFS

Minitool Power Data Recovery is a popular freemium data recovery application that should be more than able to satisfy the needs of most Mac users who have recently lost or accidentally deleted an important file and would like to restore it on their own.

Minitool Power Data Recovery may be significantly more popular among Windows users than it is among Mac users, but that doesn’t mean the Mac version is any worse. The only reason why it doesn’t enjoy more popularity is the fact that it makes it possible to recover only 1 MB of data for free (the users of the Windows version can recover up to 1 GB).

If you can look past the obvious attempt to convince Mac users to spend money on a license, there are many reasons to choose Minitool Power Data Recovery. For example, it can recover permanently deleted data from all common storage devices, including optical disks.

Even corrupted hard drives and removable storage devices are no match for the advanced data recovery algorithms that are available to users of all versions of Minitool Power Data Recovery. The application delivers below-average performance only when recovering video and music files.

Not that long ago, Minitool Power Data Recovery received a major user interface upgrade, and it’s now easier to use than ever before. The new user interface lets you apply search filters with a few simple clicks or find specific files just by entering their names.

• Easy to use

• Useful search function

• Capable of recovering lost partitions

• Comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee

• Below-average performance recovering video and music files

• Free version makes it possible to recover only 1 MB of data

Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Mac is a data recovery tool that enables you to restore deleted files on your Mac computer. It can help you recover many types of files, including photos, documents, and videos from accidental deletion or a mistakenly formatted HDD.

With its impressive data recovery capabilities and user-friendly interface, Stellar Mac Data Recovery Professional is a great choice for all Mac users who want to recover deleted documents, photos, videos, audio, and other data without much effort.

Stellar Mac Data Recovery Professional can recover data from all APFS, HFS, HFS+, ex-FAT, NTFS storage devices, including hard drives, solid-state drives, flash drives, Fusion Drives (hybrid drives), and SD cards via Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) or USB.

The latest version introduced the ability to perform recovery from a bootable USB flash drive, allowing users to recover data even from crashed Macs that refuse to boot properly. Other features you should know about include drive health monitoring and the ability to create an image of a corrupted storage device to facilitate faster and more secure data recovery.

While you can download Stellar Mac Data Recovery Professional for free, you can’t use it to recover any data. To do that, you must purchase one of the three available licenses (Professional, Premium, Technician), the most affordable of which costs $79.99.

• Recovers data from Time Machine backups

• Can recover deleted data from encrypted drives

• Create clone drives for data recovery

• Fewer file formats supported compared to some competitors

• More expensive than some of the competitive products

• Repairing volumes requires the Premium version of the tool