Duplicate files and folders waste useful disk space on your Mac PC. It is highly recommended that you frequently scan your Mac hard disk to remove the duplicate files or folders, which are definitely useless to you as well as your computer. Two ways have been identified to be useful in delete the duplicate files. First of all, you may search, locate and remove duplicate files and folders manually. Or you can use a third-party duplicate finder app to do the job. But whenever you mistakenly delete a useful duplicate file on your Mac, or you want to review the files or folders you deleted again to check whether they do not contain some useful, unique files that you still need, you do not have to panic because there are clear-cut ways to recover erased duplicate files and folders on your Mac computer.
Ways to lose your useful files and folders:
- By mistakenly removing duplicates without previewing and emptying your Trash Bin without a backup on your Mac.
- By formatting or reformatting your Mac hard drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD).
- Due to the hard drive crash or a virus infection.
- By re-installing your Mac operating system or upgrading the macOS.
- Through power failure.
Simple steps to recover deleted duplicates
A professional data recovery software designed for Apple computers to easily recover removed duplicate files and folders on your Mac even after the files have been erased, and your trash bin had been emptied is needed. It helps to recover any lost duplicate files or folders from your computer’s hard disk.
You download and install the app on your Mac laptop or desktop, then run it, and you are good to go – be it you mistakenly deleted the files or folders yourself, or they were deleted by a third-party duplicate removal app. Specify the file type or folders you want to restore, then just click your hard drive to begin a scan. Then, review the list of the deleted duplicates and then recover the desired files and folders. Before saving the recovered files to your Mac, you can also review the folders’ and files’ content. After recovering them, it is advisable to rename them with unique names so that they will no longer be regarded as duplicate files or folders on subsequent cleaning and removal of your Mac duplicates.
Good Mac hard drive recovery tools can also help recover deleted duplicates on external hard drives, SSDs (Solid-State Drive), your camera, USB drive, etc.
To recover duplicate files and folders from your SSD, you first have to scan the SSD, then go on to recover the list of recoverable files and folders and then finally preview them before storing them back on your Mac. Keep in mind that solid-state drive’s and HDD’s modes of operation differ fundamentally, and this influences the possibility of data recovery. To make a long story short, under otherwise equal conditions restoring information on SSD is harder than on HDD.
To recover duplicate files and folders after re-installing your macOS, you may use either Time Machine or external backup software. If you have them backed up prior to the OS reinstallation, you can easily restore them by extracting the backup. However, top-notch data recovery utilities might be able to restore at least some pieces of information even if you never backed up the files.
Upon losing any form of duplicate file or folder, all you need to do is to download the software and install it on your Apple computer, run it and scan your Mac’s hard drive to locate the lost files and folders. However, it is important to specify the file types you want to restore so that the scan result would be more concise and not too generalized. There are two recovery modes with using this software, there is the quick recovery mode; that gives a very fast result and an advanced recovery mode that scans the hard drive deeply. The scan results are arranged according to file type, path and time, which helps you to quickly recognize what you need, click on recover to save them on your Mac and you are good to go.
Another process users carry out on their Mac that can lead to loss of duplicates is disk repartitioning. Although it’s a complex process, some users still take the pain to carry it out using Mac’s disk utility, or other partitioning tools, as it helps to resize, delete or create volumes on their hard disk. For recovering duplicates lost after repartitioning your Mac’s hard disk, all you need to do is follow the steps already enumerated above. So, when next you lose your useful duplicate files and folders, you don’t need to panic, because now you know how to handle the situation.