Lost files on a Mac

[silverdale]

I'm not clued with a MAC but a friend's son who works in media sent me this see if anyone can help.
He's been quoted £350 to recover

"Basically I copied files from the desktop of my mac to my hard drive, they copied and when copied were fine, I thought nothing of it and deleted them from my desktop to make space. About a couple of hours later, those files I copied were saying 0 bytes, and I couldn't open them. The drive is EXFat and encrypted with bit locker"


Can anyone help ? I think he means copied desktop to an external HD ext, encrypted with bit locker.
Or
Has anyone got any good MAC recovery SW something that recovers files and files named. Were talking about 30gb lost.
Thanks

 

[sneaker]

Here is another for you to try @silverdale.

D/L Link

Disk Drill is a Mac data recovery software designed natively for Mac OS: easily protect your files from accidental deletion with Recovery Vault and recover lost data from Mac disks. Most of storage devices, file types and file systems are supported. You can recover deleted files from iPhone and Android devices! Disk Drill offers helpful and free tools for disk management like duplicate file finder, byte-to-byte backups, disk cleanup and space visualization, bootable data recovery drive, disk health monitoring, etc. Disk Drill also features a number of advanced scanning modes for data recovery of FAT, NTFS, HFS/HFS+, other file systems and formatted (initialized) drives. Using Quick Scan you can locate deleted items on FAT and NTFS disks, this scanning method is fast and accurate, but is unlikely to find data deleted long ago.

 

[TCCTech]

Honestly I find Linux really easy to use to recover files run a virtualbox of any linux distro and they download and run photorec it is a brute force file recovery program it might just help.

 

[silverdale]

The guy uses his MAC for work so it's a case of when he can get the time to try and recover the files. I've sent him all the apps peoples past on but I still think it's best to remove the hard drive, put it into a hotswap caddie and recover from there.

Thanks for the help and advices guys I'll follow up when he finds the time to give it a proper go

 

[TCCTech]

You should never use the drive you are trying to recover your files from as anything new yo do overwrites the clusters making it harder to recover