Flash Drive Recovery

What it does

List deleted photos and files — pick a connected drive and it lists every deleted file the drive still remembers, with its original name and size, filtered to what you lost (photos, camera RAW, video, audio, documents). Tick the ones you want and recover them together. No file path needed, and it works for any format, including RAW and HEIC.

Find one file by its exact name — type the name and it's looked up the same way and recovered under its real name.

Scan for file types — a last resort for drives that were formatted. It reads the whole drive for the signatures of known file types. Files come back renamed, since this mode can't know the original names.

Install it

1. Open the downloaded zip (Safari does this for you; otherwise double-click it in Downloads). You get one thing: Flash Drive Recovery. Drag it into your Applications folder, then delete the zip.
2. The first time only: open it from Applications. macOS will say it can't verify the app, because it isn't from the App Store. Click Done, then open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down to the message about Flash Drive Recovery, and click Open Anyway. Confirm with your Mac password.

That's a one-time step: it happens because the app isn't notarized by Apple, which costs a yearly developer fee. After that it opens like any other app.

Use it

1. Open the app. Your browser opens to the recovery page by itself. (The app stays in the Dock while it's running.)
2. Set an output folder — where recovered files get saved. Pick somewhere that is not the drive you're recovering from.
3. Pick your drive from the dropdown at the top (hit Refresh if you just plugged it in). You never need to find a file path.
4. Under Find deleted photos and files, choose what you lost and click List deleted files. On a big card this takes a few minutes; a progress bar shows how far along it is.
5. The first time you scan a drive, macOS asks for your Mac password. That gives the app read-only access to that one drive until you unplug it. It never changes anything on the drive.
6. Tick the files you want (the filter box and Select all shown help) and click Recover selected. They're saved to your output folder under their original names, with previews for images.
7. When you're done, quit the app (Cmd+Q, or right-click its Dock icon → Quit). That also shuts down the recovery page.

If something goes wrong

The list is empty — the drive may have been formatted, or new files may have been saved over the deleted ones. Try the Scan for file types option at the bottom of the page. If you recover a file and it's marked "check it", the space was likely reused after the file was deleted.

"An older copy is still running" — an earlier version of the app is still open. Right-click its Dock icon, choose Quit, then open the new one.

It says access is blocked — allow the app under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access, then quit and reopen it.

It asks for a password and it doesn't work — the drive password prompt needs the password of an administrator account on that Mac.

Want to see how it works? Right-click the app → Show Package Contents → Contents/Resources/source. The source and a full README.md (including the whole-drive scan mode and how to image a drive first) are in there.