How to recover lost PSD-files on Mac

“I was working on a piece of art that was the largest I have ever done. When I tried to save it, everything froze. How do I restore an unsaved file in Photoshop?”

“Yesterday, I saved my .psd file in a folder called T-file. When I checked the file, it was there. After turning off my Mac and turning it on again, I tried to open the file but it wasn’t there already… What kind of sorcery is this?! What should I do?!”

Do these situations sound familiar to you?

We often work with files in various formats, e.g. .docx and PDF for text documents, .psd and .ai for graphic files (Photoshop and Illustrator), and many others. But due to the fact that even the most advanced software is often imperfect, the so-called “program error” can put us in an awkward situation and leave us without the most important files.It is good to be able to recover a file by means of the application in which the document was created, but this is not always the case. However, there are several other ways to recover a damaged file, which we will talk about today.

Backups on Mac

Disk Drill or Time Machine is by far the easiest programs to use when you need to back up your Mac. The unique feature of the latter, for example, is that it saves data using a local snapshot, allowing you to restore almost all data, including photos, videos, documents, apps, system files, accounts, settings, and messages.

The first backup with Time Machine goes as follows: all data on your Mac is transferred to an external drive, so it can take a long time. After that, the backup will be done in a different way – the system will now only update files that have been changed since the last backup. With this approach, you can access any necessary file, as it was saved at a certain point in time. This can be very useful, for example, in a situation when a Pages file was updated in the cloud from an iPad, removing all the data from a Mac. In this case, you should just open Time Machine on your Mac and return the file to the condition you needed.

However, not everyone backs up regularly, and Windows doesn’t have the same process as macOS. No matter how much they say about the importance of backups, they are actually used by a few. The rest believe that if in a couple of years nothing has happened, there will be no problems. Well, they are wrong.

In turn, Disk Drill Hard Disk Recovery for Mac offers several methods to scan and recover deleted files, one of which is Deep Scan. Deep Scan is the most comprehensive scanning method that you can perform both on your Mac internal hard drive and external storage devices.

If you need to recover a deleted JPG, PNG image, or a lost Illustrator file, this utility can be very useful. Disk Drill PRO allows you to recognize and recover files from both Mac and Windows apps. If the file is stored on the internal hard drive of your Mac or a drive that you can connect to a Mac, it can be scanned. Here is a list of all image file formats that can be recovered by Disk Drill:

• PSB (Adobe Photoshop Large Document Format), PSD (Adobe Photoshop)
• 3FR (3F RAW Image of Hasselblad Camera)
• AEP (After Effects Project), AI (Adobe Illustrator), ARW (Sony Digital Camera)
• BLEND (Blender 3D Data file), BMP (Bitmap), C4D (Cinema 4D Model)
• CDR (CorelDRAW), CR2 (RAW Canon camera image), DNG (Digital Negative)
• DPX (Cineon Image File), EPS (Encapsulated Postscript File)
• FFF (RAW Hasselblad camera image), FH3/FH8/FH10/FH11 (FreeHand Drawings)
• INDB/INDD/INDL (Adobe InDesign), JPG (JPEG image), NEF (RAW Nikon camera image)
• ORF (Olympus camera RAW image), PEF (Pentax RAW image)
• PNG (Portable Network Graphic), PS (PostScript File)
• TIFF (Tagged Image File Format), WEBP (Internet Image Format)

How to Recover Deleted PSD files on Mac

After launching Disk Drill, choose a drive you want to scan and use all scanning methods, then leave your Mac for an hour. When the scanning process is complete, a “Recovered Files” folder (or something like that), type in the file format you are looking for. The thing is, that the files scanned will not have the same file name as the one you deleted. So it’s better to search in .psd, .afdesign, etc.

Another thing is that if you have lost a really “ancient” file, it may not be recoverable if you have overwritten a lot of new information, the files will be damaged. Try not to lose the files you need. But we wish you the best of luck in any case.

As stated by Cleverfiles (developer), Disk Drill will help you not only to recover data – also contains useful tools for working with your hard drive, which will help you clean up your Mac, find duplicate files, create backups, and monitor your drive. By downloading Disk Drill, you will get comprehensive protection for your entire drive!

iOS Devices

Accidentally clicked the wrong button? Disk Drill will help you return your deleted data back to your iPhone or iPad. Disk Drill can recover various file formats on your iOS device, including call history, contacts, messages, and more. In general, the utility is really able to work wonders.