Tips to Recover Lost Photos and Other Stuff from a Dying Mac Hard Drive

Losing one or more photos from your personal collection of photos can be deadly, in case they were clicked on a special occasion like your birthday, wedding anniversary, hang out with friends, or a family vacation. In fact, photos and videos captured on such memorable moments in your life are pretty close to your heart and you cannot even think of losing them, no matter what. What if you lose your personal of photos all of a sudden? You will not be able to digest such a huge loss of data, except you have a backup.

You can refer to data backup as a replica of your crucial files, aiming at keeping them available if the original files are corrupt or not longer available. You have to restore the backup in order to get the original files whenever required.

Hard Drives – A Preferred Storage Media

The hard drives are the most preferred storage media with massive storage capacity (in Terabytes). You can partition your Mac hard drive into a number of volumes for storing different types of data in separate volumes. For instance, you can store all the downloaded applications in one volume, your photos, videos, and movies in second volume, while all the professional documents in another one. Doing this not only lets you keep store your data in a well-organized way, but it also enables you access it quite easily. You do not have to go through each volume individually searching for a specific file or folder. You can simply open the volume containing all such files and locate the one that you are looking for. 

Based on requirements, you may prefer having an external drives as well, especially for backup.

Issues with the Hard Drives

The hard drives contain electronic and magnetic components, such as a spindle motor, read & write head, magnetic platter, electric circuit, etc. All these components are arranged mechanically, aimed at storing data in a reliable way. However, these drives fail to assure you about data security and eventually lead to failure. Apart from their internals, the hard drives get corrupt when they become too old and contain too many bad sectors. Combining all such scenarios, aiming for recovering all the lost files, mentioned below are some tips and trick to recover photos from dying Mac hard drive.

Convert your Mac Hard Drive to External Drive

If your Mac is no longer detecting its internal hard drive, it most likely is dead. You eject that hard drive followed by unscrewing your Mac. Make sure you take proper care while doing this; Or else, you may get that hard drive severely damaged. Subsequently, get a hard drive enclosure that your hard drive fits in properly, and then turn your Mac hard drive into an external drive. Once the external hard drive is ready, go to your friend’s place and try connecting it to his Mac with a SATA to USB cable, and check if it is detected. If the machine detects your drive, move out all your crucial photos and other files immediately.

What if Mac Fails to Detect it?

When you connect your Mac hard drive to a secondary Mac, It may fail to detect that drive. In case it fails, try connecting it to a Linux based system. Most likely the Linux system will detect it and then you can move your precious photos along with other crucial files to an external drive. You may also try connecting it to a Windows based computer and see it its helps you out. If it does, immediately go for data backup.

What if the Files Not Located?

After you connect your Mac hard drive to a secondary Mac or Windows system, you may encounter two different scenarios, i.e. you open the hard drive and move all your crucial files out. Alternatively, it could also be like that you do not find your files on the hard drive. What if it really happens? Would you be able to digest the loss of your personal collection of photos and other stuff? I don’t think you would be able to. Anyway, you need to use a professional photo recovery software to retrieve all the photos that no longer exist on that hard drive. With such recovery software, you can recover photos from dying Mac hard drive. For this, scan the entire Mac hard drive or the volume that contained the lost media files, and then go for saving either all or selected items. Make sure you have a secondary drive to save the recovered files.

Avoiding Data Loss

The best and productive step you can take in order to avoid data loss is having a backup copy of every single crucial file of yours. If feasible for you, use a network drive to save all these files. Or else, you can save individual files in your mailbox or to a cloud storage, such as Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.