My external drive is the “My Passport Air” – a very nice 1TB drive – so I’m going to double-click on that entry at the bottom of the list to proceed.

The first step is to specify to the program which drive you want to have scanned for lost files: Any guesses how to get started? You’re right! Click on “ Start“… Since I know that the files I want are videos and images, I unchecked the other file types to make the job of picking through the potentially recovered files. With the external drive plugged in I launched iBeeSoft Data Recover for Mac. Tip: On a MacOS X system, the Trash shows what’s queued for deletion both on your boot drive and any external drives while attached and accessible.

I did the usual and checking the Trash for the files. Turns out, I needed this handy program just the other day, after getting an external drive back from a colleague just to find that somehow she’d deleted a folder of client videos I really needed to work on. With this program you can recover things that have been completely deleted, even from removable drives. Unless you have a super helpful crisis aversion utility like iBeeSoft Data Recovery for Mac. It’s still the case that once you digitally empty that trashcan, however, you’re out of luck. Decide you don’t want it deleted? Open the trash and pull it out. Fortunately your Mac has a much better design now and when you delete a file, it’s not actually deleted, it’s moved to a staging area that’s represented by the trashcan. Which meant that backups were really important because there wasn’t any room for error nor any recovering from an impulsive desire to do some digital spring cleaning. In the early days of computing, files either were visible and part of your file system or they were gone.

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