restore external hard drive

I'm very new to the mac world and have a question. I believe my son erased all our pictures off our external hard drive. Is there any way to restore the hard drive and get my pictures back? thanks

G'day and welcome to the forums.

Did he erase and format the hard drive? There are a number of recovery utilities such as Data Recovery but they are not cheap.

http://www.macintosh-data-recovery.com/?gclid=CJPL_8Cx76YCFZCCpAodSnirEw

Can you recall what he did? Did he just highlight all and hit delete...did he reformat the drive? More information will help us determine what you may or may not be able to do.


As harryb2448 stated, there are a number or recovery utilities but they can be pricey. It might be best to try one that offers a free trial to see what you can do. If it is something of the utmost importance, there are data recovery companies you can send the drive to and they will be able to get a lot more than any computer software would be able to do. One example of a good company would be here: Hard Drive Recovery RAID Data Recovery Company Free Evaluation

Bare with me here this is coming from an explanation from him. I don't know what he did! He didn't open up the mounted external hard drive and delete them from there this I know. From his explanation he thinks he deleted them from the "all images". Went to application folder on the dock then to open in folder and all images highlighted all the images and deleted them. He thought they wouldn't delete off the external just off the mac itself. Thats all the info I know! Any help would be great!

I wondered if I could restore the mac back to a couple days before like you can on a pc? Like I said I'm really new to mac and still don't know my way around it.

Thread moved to correct forum. Does not belong in "Images........"

Unless you were making backups of your hard drive with Time Machine or some other backup software, you can not restore anything without using expensive recovery software. And the chances of recovery software working is slim if you used the computer after he deleted them.

Even if you were using Windows, you couldn't restore photos that were deleted because the Windows System Restore function does not backup documents, photos, data, etc.

If you wish, you can try to recover them with Data Rescue 3. You can download a trial version to see if it will work for you. If it does, buy a license. ($99.00)

thanks for the info

Well, definitely you cannot recover the files from external hard drive for free, as most Mac External Hard Drive Recovery Tools are not free. However, paying a little to get back your precious data is worth it.