I accidentally deleted the wrong folder from an HFS drive and need help figuring out the safest way to recover the lost files. I haven’t written much to the disk since, but I’m not sure which HFS recovery tools or steps are best to avoid making things worse.
First thing: stop writing anything to that drive. If this is an old HFS or HFS+ external disk, deleted files may still be sitting there, but every new write can overwrite the stuff you’re trying to get back. So don’t copy anything to it, don’t “repair” it yet, and don’t format it again.
I’d check the basic drive health before jumping into recovery software:
- Open Disk Utility and see if the drive shows up there.
- Try a different USB port or cable if it’s an external drive.
- If the enclosure lets you see SMART data, check it. A bunch of bad sectors or health warnings means you should treat this like a failing drive, not a simple deletion issue.
- If the disk is dropping out, taking forever to read, or acting unstable, make an image of the drive first and recover from that instead of repeatedly scanning the original disk.
For HFS/HFS+ recovery, I usually point people toward Disk Drill. It handles HFS volumes pretty well, and it can often scan a drive even when Finder won’t mount it, as long as macOS can still see the device in Disk Utility.
The basic flow is simple enough:
- Install Disk Drill somewhere other than the drive you’re recovering from.
- Pick the HFS or HFS+ drive in the app.
- Use Search for Lost Data. For most external disks, Universal Scan is the option I’d start with.
- Let the scan finish instead of stopping it early.
- Preview the files that matter before recovering them.
- Save the recovered files to a different healthy drive, not back onto the original one.
Emptying the Trash doesn’t automatically mean the files are gone forever. Same with a quick format. A lot of the time, the file entries are removed but the actual data stays on the disk until something else overwrites it. That’s why leaving the drive alone matters so much.
Also, if you have a Time Machine backup, check that before doing anything else. Restoring from a backup is cleaner and safer than trying to rebuild files from the disk.
Where I’d stop DIY attempts is when the drive looks physically unhealthy. Clicking, grinding, buzzing, constant disconnects, freezing the Mac, disappearing from Disk Utility, or scans failing because of read errors are all bad signs. In that situation, running scan after scan can make things worse. A recovery lab starts to make more sense there.
If the drive still shows up and isn’t acting like the hardware is dying, then recovery software is worth trying before you do anything that changes the disk. Accidental deletion and file system damage are usually much better cases than a failing drive.
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Make a byte-for-byte image of the drive before running any recovery scan, especially if the files matter more than the time it takes. Disk Drill or similar tools are fine, but scanning the original disk first is the gamble people forget about, since a weak HFS drive can get worse just from being read hard for hours.
If this was on an SSD or a Fusion drive with TRIM involved, the answer gets a lot less hopeful, because deleted blocks may already be zeroed even if you barely used the Mac afterward. On a plain spinning HFS/HFS+ external, I agree with imaging first, but don’t be surprised if some recovered files lose folder structure or names since deleting a folder can wipe the directory records before the actual contents are overwritten. Disk Drill is fine for a first pass if the disk is healthy, but for a free/rough check you can try PhotoRec/TestDisk against the image, with the catch that it often recovers by file type and dumps messy filenames. Whatever tool you use, don’t run First Aid yet if recovery matters. It can “fix” the file system in a way that makes undelete harder.
