What it finds.
Built for photos and videos. Documents and every other file the drive still knows by name come back too.
Formats
| Photos | JPEG, HEIC, PNG, GIF, WebP, TIFF, AVIF |
|---|---|
| RAW | DNG, Canon CR2 and CR3, Sony ARW, Nikon NEF, Fujifilm RAF, Olympus ORF, Panasonic RW2, Leica RWL, Pentax PEF, Samsung SRW, Hasselblad 3FR and FFF |
| Video | MP4, MOV, AVI, AVCHD (MTS, M2TS), M2T. A video that was recorded around other files on the card is put back together and checked against its own index, even from many pieces. If a piece lies out of order or was overwritten, the video stays honestly marked "fragmented". |
| Audio | WAV, MP3 |
| Documents | Word, Excel, PowerPoint (new and old), PDF, ZIP |
| Everything else | Every other file the drive still names is listed too, marked unverified. |
Drives and file systems
Drives
Memory cards, USB sticks, external drives, and backup images made earlier. Not the Mac's own disk: Apple Silicon Macs keep it encrypted, so a scan would find only cipher text. For files deleted on the Mac, look in Photos under Recently Deleted, or in Time Machine.
File systems
FAT32 and exFAT (cameras and cards), NTFS (Windows disks). Names, folders and dates come back, also after a quick format where the old directories survived.
Files deleted in the Finder often sit in the drive's hidden trash. Those come back with names.
What it does not do.
- Bring back overwritten data. When a drive was wiped or reused, the app says so within seconds.
- Guess at a video when a piece lies out of order or was overwritten. It stays honestly marked "fragmented".
- Repair damaged files.
- Read APFS, HFS+ or ext.
- Recover files from the Mac's own disk. It is encrypted on Apple Silicon Macs, a scan would find only cipher text.
- Run on Windows.
In our tests
- Deleted files, nothing written afterwards: 100 percent back, byte-identical, with names and dates, on FAT32, exFAT and NTFS.
- Quick-formatted media: about 92 to 99 percent of files byte-identical.
- A real 64 GB SD card with photos, RAW, videos and audio, deleted and the trash emptied: every file came back byte-identical.
- Fragmented videos: on FAT32 test cards 8 of 8 came back byte-identical, on exFAT 6 of 8. No file was wrongly called intact.
Our test media. Real drives vary.