SD card, a non-volatile flash memory card, is wildly used in digital cameras, video game consoles, mobile phones, action cameras, etc., for its high capacity, fast read-write speed, tiny size, lightness, portability, and so forth. You can save files, photos, and videos on SD cards.
If you want to transfer files between Mac and the SD card, you can connect it to Mac via the SD card slot or a compatible SD card reader. Unexpectedly, some users found their photos or videos missing from the SD card.
Once you find some files on the SD card are lost, you must stop using the SD card immediately to avoid further damage to your data. Then, follow our guide below to recover files from an SD card on Mac.
Possible causes of the data loss on SD card
Many reasons could lead to data loss on your SD card, and manual misoperation is the most common one. You may mistakenly delete photos from the SD card or incorrectly format the SD card to clear all contents.
In addition to that, other reasons, such as malware and virus infection, file system corruption, and physical damage, can also result in data loss on your SD card. And data loss on storage media caused by physical damage usually is hard to recover.
Steps to recover files from SD card on Mac
The deleted/lost files, photos, or videos on the SD card may be very important for you, and you can try the methods below to get them back on Mac with or without data recovery software, depending on your case. Now, let’s explore them one by one.
Recover SD card files from Mac Trash
In case you had transferred these items from the SD card to your Mac before you removed them from the SD card intentionally or not, they were moved to the Trash when you deleted these copies on Mac. You can undo the deletions in Trash to put them back only if you haven’t emptied the Trash.
1. Click the Trash located on the far right of the Dock.
2. Find the deleted files you want to recover to the SD card.
3. Select the target items and control-click to choose Put Back.
4. Transfer the recovered files from the Mac to your SD card.
Get lost SD card files with backup
Backing up your important files regularly gives you a way to retrieve files back when you suffer data loss on storage media like SD cards, HDDs, SSDs, USB flash drives, and so on. If you have enabled Time Machine, it automatically backs up the connected SD card, so you can find lost files with the available Time Machine backup. Here’s how:
1. Connect the Time Machine backup drive to your Mac. Enter password if required.
2. Open a window of the folder where your SD card file was stored. (optional)
3. Click the Time Machine icon at the menu bar and select Enter Time Machine.
4. Scroll over or use the Up/Down arrows to find the file you need to recover.
5. Select the target item and press Space Bar to preview it.
6. Then click the Restore button to recover them to your Mac.
If you have backup the SD card in other ways, such as iCloud Drive and third-party backup software, you can find the backup there to rescue lost SD card files.
Recover files using SD card recovery software
Unluckily, if you can’t find deleted/lost SD card files from Mac Trash and there is no available backup of the SD card, then using SD card recovery software is your last resort. There is a chance to perform an SD card recovery on Mac before the data is overwritten.
Such SD card recovery software can scan out deleted files and lost files as many as possible on the storage media for you to recover back. Among the products on the market, iBoysoft Data Recovery stands out with a high recovery rate, fast recovery speed, and risk-free environment.
Steps to recover files from SD card on Mac with iBoysoft Data Recovery:
1. Download and install iBoysoft Data Recovery on your Mac computer.
2. Connect the SD card to your Mac via Mac’s SD card slot, an SD card adapter, or an external drive reader, or directly connect the device with an SD card embedded, such as a digital camera.
3. Launch iBoysoft Data Recovery on Mac. It automatically detects the connected SD card and all other partitions and lists them in the main interface.
4. Select the SD card where you delete or lose important files, then click the Scan button to search for lost data on the SD card.
5. All found files will be listed there, and you can categorize them by path and type, find the items you want to recover and click the Preview button to preview them.
6. Select the recoverable files and click Recover to save them to a different location. Make sure you have recovered all the files you wanted, then quit iBoysoft Data Recovery and eject the SD card on your Mac.
iBoysoft Data Recovery is professional SD card recovery software that can recover all kinds of files, such as photos, documents, videos, archives, and other files from SDSC, SDHC, SDXC, SDUC, micro SD, and mini SD. When you lose files from formatted, unreadable, corrupted, and inaccessible SD cards, you can try iBoysoft Data Recovery to rescue your files.
What’s more, this powerful app also works with other disk-based storage media like HDD, SSD, and USB flash drives, supports 1000+ file formats and is compatible with Mac OS X 10.9 and later versions, T2-secured Macs, and Apple Silicon Macs.
If the SD card containing the files you want to retrieve is physically damaged, any data recovery software cannot recover files from it. In this way, you should take it to a local repair for further help. Data recovery experts attempt to image the bad sectors on the SD card and glean recoverable data.
A computer engineer by day, gamer by night. He grew up playing Mario and contra, and just like every other 90s kid, he got passionate about mobile gaming. He had done bachelors in computer science and played fps and MOBA games for years.
