Mac External Hard Drive - How to Recover Data from Unreadable external hard drives

Despite the robust nature and very few chances of virus contamination, Mac too at times encounters data loss. Therefore, many Mac users maintain backup of their valuable files and folders on an external hard drive. An external hard drive can be attached externally to your machine, and thus can be used to take the backup of data as well as can be used to move data from one machine to another. But, have you ever thought that what you will do if this data backup device, on which you have banked upon for the security of your data, gets corrupt and all the data stored in it becomes unreadable?

Well, at times users come across such situations wherein they get an error message when they attach the external hard drive to their computer. The corruption in external hard drive is caused generally due to improper ways of handling the drive, corruption of its file system, virus infection, and other such causes. Let us take a practical example to understand this situation:

In order to restore some files that you accidentally delete from your Mac, when you attached your external hard drive (which is having backup of data) to your computer, you encounter the following error message:

"The disk is unreadable: Do you want to initialize it now?"

This issue occurs when your Mac OS X becomes unable to read anything from your external hard drive due to its corruption. However, in such case, you may try 'Disk Utility' to rectify this error message. Generally the 'Disk Utility' ends up with the following error message when you try to rectify this issue:

"Verify and Repair volume "disk1s3" Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume. Invalid node structure Invalid B-tree node size Invalid node structure Invalid B-tree node size Volume check failed. Error: File system verify or repair failed"

This error message is caused when your external hard drive has invalid data structure. However, node structure corruption or corruption of file system can also be the causes for the same. As per the causes, if you replace the damaged structure with a new one, then you can easily overcome this issue of unreadable disk. However, replacement or re-installation of file system deletes all the data from the hard drive and thus causes data loss.

To handle such situations use of professional Mac data recovery software is recommended. Reliable Mac data recovery tool recovers lost, deleted, or formatted data from Mac-based internal or external hard drives. Moreover, an efficient software for this category recovers all types of files stored in your system, which may range from documents, photos, videos, music, etc. Almost all data recovery tools for Mac have easily understandable user interface and thus are easily used by a non-technical person as well.

So, if you encounter any such issues, wherein your external hard disk gets corrupt and formatting remains the only resolution to get back its working, then use of a professional Mac data recovery software is recommended.

Read Best 5 Backupper Software for Mac