Can someone please help restoring lost files from external drive?
Hello, I have had a generic external drive for several years that has worked without any issues. This evening, after realizing that Apple Music had once again "lost" songs from my personal library, I connected my external drive to restore the missing songs from my backup. All of the folders and files were listed; however, I was unable to open any of the files due to an "unsupported format." This occurred for every type of file format, including .zip. After searching for a solution, I was guided to disk utility where I attempted to run first aid which resulted in an error message. I then unmounted the drive (which I thought was synonymous with eject) which appears to have deleted all of the contents including the name of my drive. Now the drive is no longer recognized by my MacBook making it impossible for me to determine if these files are lost forever which I am sadly assuming to be the case. Is there any way that I may not have lost all of these important files? Many of them are still stored in cloud storage, but many were photos, old papers, home movies, etc. that will be lost forever if my drive has been deleted. So:
- Can anyone please let me know if I may be able to recover these files?
- If this is possible, how do I do it?
- What may have been the reason(s) that I was suddenly unable to open any of the files stored on my external drive? And why would this happen when using disk utility?
Running MacOs Monterey 12.3.1
Thank you in advance,
Ryan
MacBook Air 11″, macOS 12.3
