Frequently asked questions

Yes. There's no trial, no limit on files or data, no account and no email sign-up. After a successful recovery, it offers you the option to leave a tip. That's the only time it asks. Here's why it's free.

No. macOS opens the card or drive read-only for Found Again, so it can't change anything on it. While scanning, Found Again also unmounts the disk so macOS can't write search indexes or other hidden files to it. And it won't let you save recovered files back onto the disk you're recovering from, which would overwrite the files you're trying to rescue.

macOS only lets an app read a disk directly, sector by sector, with an administrator's permission. The password box is macOS's own. Once you enter it, macOS opens that one disk read-only for Found Again. You're asked once per scan.

macOS privacy protections can block apps from reading memory cards and drives until you allow it. If that happens, Found Again shows you what to do. Open System Settings › Privacy & Security › Full Disk Access, turn on Found Again (if it isn't listed, click + and choose it in Applications), then come back and click the disk again. You only need to do this once, and Found Again still only reads the disk.

No. There's no tracking, no analytics and no account, and the app never connects to the internet. Your files are read on your Mac and saved to a folder you choose on your Mac or another drive.

weio Ltd, a small company in the UK.

Any Mac running macOS 14 Sonoma or later, with Apple silicon or an Intel processor.

Apps from the Mac App Store aren't allowed to read a memory card directly, and that's exactly what recovery needs. So Found Again is available from foundagain.app and through Homebrew instead.

Yes. Found Again is signed and notarized by Apple, so macOS checks it and opens it like any other app. The first time, macOS may ask you to confirm that you want to open an app downloaded from the internet. Download it from foundagain.app, or install it with Homebrew using the command on the download page.

SD and microSD cards, CompactFlash and CFexpress cards (in a card reader), USB flash drives, and external hard drives and SSDs. It doesn't scan your Mac's internal drive.

A Mac's internal SSD erases deleted data automatically using a command called TRIM, and it's always encrypted, so there's nothing a scan can reliably bring back. Check the Trash, Photos › Recently Deleted (30 days), iCloud Drive's Recently Deleted on iCloud.com (30 days), Time Machine and the app's version history instead. Our guide to files deleted from a Mac has the steps.

No. A phone connected to a Mac can't be scanned. On the iPhone, open Photos, scroll down to Utilities and tap Recently Deleted, where photos are kept for 30 days. If you use iCloud Photos, you can also recover them at iCloud.com. For an Android phone with a microSD card used as portable storage, take the card out and scan it with a card reader. A card the phone set up as internal storage is encrypted and can't be scanned.

Most cameras connected by USB cable appear only in Photos or Image Capture, not as a disk. Take the card out of the camera and put it in your Mac's SD slot or a card reader.

On FAT32 and exFAT disks, deleted files of any type can come back with their names through the file records. The deep scan, which finds files by their contents, recognizes JPEG, HEIC, PNG, GIF, TIFF, WebP, BMP and PSD; RAW files from Canon (CR2, CR3), Nikon (NEF), Sony (ARW), Fujifilm (RAF), Olympus and OM System (ORF), Panasonic (RW2), Pentax (PEF) and Samsung (SRW), plus Adobe DNG; MOV, MP4, M4V, 3GP, AVI, MKV and WebM video; MP3, WAV, M4A and FLAC audio; PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint (old and new formats), Pages, Numbers, Keynote, EPUB and ZIP.

Reading the file records is very fast. The deep scan reads the whole disk, so it depends on size and connection. As a rule of thumb, allow 1 to 3 minutes per 10 GB with a USB 3 card reader, and longer with USB 2. A 64 GB card typically takes 6 to 20 minutes, and a 1 TB drive can take several hours.

Yes. Files appear as they're found, and you can recover them at any time. You can also stop the scan and still recover everything found so far.

Found Again unmounts the card while scanning so macOS can't write to it. That's expected. It isn't a sign that anything has gone wrong.

Files found through the disk's file records keep their names, folders and dates. Files found by the deep scan, for example after a format, have no record left, so photos are named by the date and time they were taken, like 2024-06-01 14.30.00.jpg, along with the camera model.

Partial means part of the file couldn't be traced, so it may open with missing sections. Damaged means the start of the file has been overwritten, so it probably won't open. If the disk has unreadable sectors, Found Again fills those parts with blanks and lists the affected files in a note saved with your recovered files.

The most common reason is that new photos or files were saved over them. A full or low-level format in the camera also wipes the card completely. External SSDs formatted as APFS or Mac OS Extended are usually trimmed, which erases deleted data. Encrypted drives can't be scanned. And long videos on big cards are sometimes stored in pieces that can't all be traced. If the files were ever copied elsewhere, a phone, Photos on your Mac or iCloud may still have them.