Setup, permissions, and troubleshooting.

DataRecover Pro reads drives at the block level, which macOS rightly locks down. The app never touches raw disk from its own window — a small privileged helper does that work — so macOS asks you to approve two things the first time you open it. Both are one-time, and neither requires a restart.

This dialog means macOS can't find a filesystem it understands — the partition table or volume header is damaged, not necessarily your files. The next click matters more than anything else you do.

1. Click Ignore. Never click Initialize or Erase — both write a fresh, empty filesystem over the one you're trying to recover.
2. Stop writing to the drive. Don't run Disk Utility First Aid yet, don't let the camera or another app format it.
3. Open DataRecover Pro and pick the physical disk (the top-level entry, e.g. “SanDisk Extreme 1 TB”), not a volume under it — there may be no mountable volume left.
4. Run a Quick scan first. It reads whatever filesystem structures survive and brings files back with their names and folders. If it finds little, run a Deep scan, which also searches the whole disk for lost partitions and carves files by signature.

If the drive clicks, grinds, keeps disconnecting, or scanning is painfully slow, use Image + Analyze first: the app copies every readable sector to an image file on a healthy drive in one pass, then you scan the image instead. Repeated scans of a failing drive can finish it off; one careful pass is the safest thing you can do.

Cards are the most recoverable media there is — as long as nothing writes to them after the loss.

• Don't shoot more photos on it. Every new frame lands on space the deleted ones may still occupy.
• Don't format when the camera asks. A “card error, format?” prompt usually means the FAT/exFAT directory is damaged, not the photos. Say no, take the card out, and put it in a reader.
• Quick scan first. On a card that was merely deleted-from, quick scan reads the exFAT or FAT32 directory and returns the original filenames (DSC_4821.NEF, IMG_0042.HEIC) in seconds.
• Deep scan for formatted cards. A format wipes the directory, so the app finds photos by their signatures instead — JPEG, HEIC, and every major RAW format included. Filenames are lost this way (you'll get numbered files by type), but the images and their EXIF dates come back, and Quick Look lets you confirm each one before you recover it.

A recovered file that shows a broken-image icon or an “unsupported format” error is usually mostly intact — the structure that tells software how to read it is what got damaged. Send it through Repair. The assessment is free and tells you what the engine can do before anything is written.

Repair works in three tiers. Clean fixes minor structural damage with no data loss — the file was whole, only its framing was broken. Structural rebuilds the container (headers, indexes, the moov atom in a video) around intact media streams when more of the structure is missing. Partial salvages the readable portion when a file is genuinely incomplete — half a video, or the full-size preview extracted from a damaged RAW. The engine has dedicated rebuilders for JPEG, PNG, GIF, MP4/MOV, PDF, and Word (.docx); for RAW, HEIC, TIFF, and archives it extracts the intact images inside; everything else gets the partial-salvage pass. Every repair runs in a sandboxed worker with no network and no write access to the rest of your Mac.

Always a different drive than the source. Writing recovered files back onto the drive you're recovering from overwrites the very blocks other lost files still occupy — it's the most common way people turn a recoverable drive into an unrecoverable one. Scanning is read-only; the destination you choose at recovery time is the only place the app writes.

Recovering from your internal Mac drive? Plug in an external SSD or USB drive and recover there. Recovering from an external drive or card? Your internal drive is a fine destination. Make sure the destination has more free space than the total size of what you selected.

Scanning and preview are free and need no account. A license unlocks recovery and repair on up to 3 Macs. Sign in inside the app (Sign In in the sidebar) with the email you bought with; the Mac you're on is activated automatically.

Replacing a Mac, or hit the limit? Deactivate an old device from the Devices page in your account portal, then sign in on the new one. The app checks its license online periodically but keeps working offline between checks, so a recovery in the field doesn't need a connection.

Email support@datarecoverpro.com. A person reads every message and replies within one business day.

To help us help you fast, in the app open Settings → Export Logs for Support and attach the file it saves. The log holds diagnostic detail about the scan and the app's permission state — never the names or contents of your files. Include your macOS version (Apple menu → About This Mac) and the kind of drive involved (internal SSD, external HDD, SD card, USB stick), plus what you were doing when it went wrong.