It is quite possible that you accidentally format a wrong external storage drive connected to your Mac with the latest macOS Catalina 10.15 installed.
“Imagine a situation in which you connect a USB flash drive and an external hard drive on to your MacBook Pro. You require to transfer few important videos from the external hard drive to the USB flash drive for sharing them to your friend. But, due to lack of storage space on the flash drive, you wish to format it. Hence, you launch Disk Utility and wrongly select the external drive then click Erase. Horrors! You accidentally format the external hard drive containing videos instead of the USB flash drive. And, when you don’t have a backup, you lose all your videos forever.”
Accidental formatting of an external storage drive is a common human error. For that reason, you need to know how to deal with such a state of affair.
5 Events that Requires Formatting an External Storage Drive
- Conversion from HFS+ to APFS
- Formatting to HFS+ for Time Machine
- Conversion to ex-FAT for Mac & PC compatibility
- Removal of stored content for disposing
- Reclaiming the lost storage drive space
In case you’ve formatted your external storage drive containing valuable videos on macOS Catalina, you should know how to recover them by yourself.
Whatever be the reason, you must carry out the drive formatting task carefully. Copy all your important video files stored on the external storage drive to yet another storage medium. This backing up of your videos ensure you don’t lose them permanently due to storage drive erasure.
Video Recovery from Formatted External Hard Drive on macOS Catalina
It is now possible to hard drive recover videos from a formatted external on macOS Catalina 10.15. Only a handful of Mac undelete software available online is fully capable of performing formatted drive recovery on macOS Catalina. And, Stellar Data Recovery Premium for Mac is the world’s first undelete software that can also fix photos and videos. To try out, download and install *trial version of the premium application on your MacBook Pro.
Steps to recover deleted videos from external storage drive on mac by using the software:
Select: Launch the software to interact with the first screen that shows different data types. Select Video data type, then click Next to proceed. Select the formatted external storage drive in the next screen.
Scan: Toggle on Deep Scan from the bottom left corner of the interface to scan the drive by using file signature. Click Scan to initiate scanning. The software scans the drive and updates scan progress. Click OK when the scan finishes. Save scan information so that you don’t need to scan the storage drive again. Use the load scan feature to proceed.
Recover: Click a tab from the left pane then click nodes to expand. This video recovery Mac software allows you to preview files before recovery. Preview any recoverable videos and select all the necessary ones. Click Recover. Specify yet another external drive to save data. Navigate to the save location to check the integrity of the recovered videos.
*Trial version of Stellar Data Recovery Premium for Mac is for free scanning and preview. This demo functionality helps you to judge the tool’s recovery capability and user experience. Once you are satisfied, activate the software to save recoverable data.
Valuable Tips:
- Don’t use the formatted external storage drive to save any files on it until you recover all the inaccessible data from it.
- Don’t save the recovered files to the same external storage drive.
- Install the Mac undelete software on your system beforehand to leverage it immediately after data loss.
- Create a backup of your external storage drive. Adhering to 3-2-1 backup strategy ensures you don’t lose any data, anymore.
Conclusion
Now you know that it is possible to recover your lost videos from a formatted external storage drive on macOS Catalina 10.15 by using a compatible data recovery software. All you need to do is to stop using the formatted external drive immediately until you recover its stored content.
Download a free trial of Stellar Dara Recovery Premium which is compatible with macOS Catalina 10.15 now. Install the software and launch it to perform the recovery task in three easy steps—select the external drive, scan it, recover lost videos to another storage medium with sufficient space.
