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Hi guys,
Is there a way to retrieve my files and photos I had on my Mac OSX internal drive? I was installing windows and was having some trouble so I followed a YouTube video on fixing the problem. However I only realized it’s for those that don’t have OS X... this is the video:
****
Is there a way to undo this? I think I reformatted my entire disk to NTFS...
[Link Edited by Moderator]
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.15
No backups means no data recovery path.
Re-partitioning is a hazardous sequence, and corruptions mean reloading all partitions.
Recovery from backups of each of the partitions, usually.
If a data recovery service was unsuccessful, your data is almost certainly gone.
If this is an SSD, the data was gone just as soon as the reformatting began.
If the storage was encrypted, the data is gone just as soon as the encryption keys are clobbered.
If this was a hard disk or if there was remaining data, any competent recovery company would have gotten it.
Unfortunately, most folks get to learn about the need for backups, sooner or later.
No backups means no data recovery path.
Re-partitioning is a hazardous sequence, and corruptions mean reloading all partitions.
Recovery from backups of each of the partitions, usually.
If a data recovery service was unsuccessful, your data is almost certainly gone.
If this is an SSD, the data was gone just as soon as the reformatting began.
If the storage was encrypted, the data is gone just as soon as the encryption keys are clobbered.
If this was a hard disk or if there was remaining data, any competent recovery company would have gotten it.
Unfortunately, most folks get to learn about the need for backups, sooner or later.
Formatting your Mac drive to NTFS, not only eradicated any Mac data on that drive, it also whacked your ability to restore macOS from Recovery too. You get the Darwin award for following a dangerous YouTube video.
The only means to recover your original Mac data is if you had a current Time Machine backup, or had cloned the macOS drive to an external drive — before you destroyed everything. Even then, you will need to create a bootable Catalina USB stick, provided you have access to another Mac that will allow you to download Catalina and do that.
Once you have Catalina installed, on your first boot, you can offer to restore from a previous (Catalina) Time Machine drive.
Typically the 'backup religion' is only recognized after a catastrophic failure:
3-2-1 Backup Strategy: three copies of your data, two different methods, and one offsite.
Boot clone https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-10081
How to use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250
Use DiskUtility Restore feature https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/restore-a-disk-dskutl14062/mac
note: >System Preferences>Security & Privacy >Privacy>Full Disk Access
unlock the padlock, press the + button and add Disk Utility
In that sequence, the erase is a quick version to clear the file table and reassign it as NTFS. Meaning, the data should still be on the drive.
However, recovering it will not be easy. Or, I should say, it will be very time consuming. If you do not have a restorable backup of any kind to use as VikingOSX suggests, then you'll have to take the long way around to recover anything.
You will need another, separate drive with enough space to write recovered data to. Start the app, select the drive you want it to scan for data and wait. This first part could easily take hours.
It's not at all unusual for the recovery process to find and save a lot of data, but not with their original names. They will offer to attempt to give each recovered item its real name, but usually don't do very well at it.
They didn't try very hard if they couldn't recover anything at all.
But, that does make sense if MrHoffman's note about FileVault is true. To repeat that part, if you did have the drive encrypted with FileVault, then any recovery is quite literally impossible.
If you did not have the drive encrypted, then you may as well take a shot at it yourself. Install the OS to a new, external drive. Then download the demo of FileSalvage and see if it can find anything on the internal drive.
If even that doesn't work, then the only thing you've lost, so to speak, is the cost of the external drive. But it's not really lost since you will now have something to use for backups.
Hi Kurt,
Thanks for replying! I sent my laptop to a data recovery company and they weren’t able to get anything back...should I still give what you suggested a try? Or are my files gone?
Lesson learned :( thanks for the reply!
Reformatted entire disk to NTFS? Any way to recover files??
