How to Recover Data from an External Hard Drive

You've hooked up your external hard disk drive to your computer, but it appears to be empty. What has happened to your files? After checking the cables, there is still no change, which means there is only one explanation: the drive is corrupt or has been accidentally reformatted.

The solution is software to recover data from your external hard drive. That's where Tenorshare 4DDiG Data Recovery comes in.

Data Recovery Is Simple With the Right Software

Unresponsive disks are a nightmare to deal with. It's like having a completed jigsaw on a tray that gets tipped over and the pieces fall everywhere – except they also turn invisible!

Corrupt and accidentally deleted disks hide your data, which means you need tailored software to find the files. Recovery software is the key, utilities designed to scan the disk, find data, and undelete it.

Not all recovery software is ideal for every task. Some are aimed at internal hard disks, others specifically for USB flash storage. Other tools are developed to recover files from external hard drives.

Other tools, like Tenorshare 4DDiG, can recover data from everything – internal drives, external drives, anything you throw at it.

Tenorshare 4DDiG Data Recovery can handle all manner of data loss scenarios. Consider files lost through accidental deletion, file corruption (possibly with a virus or malware link), hardware failure (perhaps when the disk is reaching the end of its life), and even unforeseen events. If you don't have any off-site data backup, the risk of thunderstorms, earthquakes, fires, and floods puts your data at risk.

How Tenorshare 4DDiG Can Make Data Recovery Easy

Available with a free trial, Tenorshare 4DDiG is available for Windows 7 and later and Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite onwards. We've looked at the Windows version, which supports FAT16, FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS file systems. To recover data with Tenorshare 4DDiG, your computer should have a 1GHz CPU, at least 512MB of RAM, and 200MB or more storage.

While we're looking mainly at external hard disk drives here, Tenorshare 4DDiG Data Recovery is also suitable for internal drives, SD cards, USB flash storage, digital cameras, and many other storage types.

Meanwhile, over 1000 data types can be recovered from an external disk drive with Tenorshare 4DDiG. These include images and photos (JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF, PSD, etc.), videos (AVI, MOV, MP4, TS, and so on), audio (MP3, AIF, M4A, WAV, etc.), documents (DOC/DOCX, XLS/XLSX, PPT/PPTX, PDF, CSV, TXT, many others), archives and emails (PST, OST, 7Z, ZIP, EXE, IMG, etc.) and many others.

Put simply, there isn't a Windows data recovery scenario for any type of disk media that you can't expect results from. Tenorshare 4DDiG Data Recovery is the complete deleted data recovery solution.

But how easy is it to restore old data from an external disk drive?

Recover Data From an External Hard Drive With Tenorshare 4DDiG

With a simple, straightforward user interface, you'll find 4DDiG finds and recovers data from your external hard disk drive with just a few clicks.

After downloading Tenorshare 4DDiG Data Recovery and installing it on your system, connect your external hard disk drive to your computer as normal.

Next, run Tenorshare 4DDiG Data Recovery, and select the drive. If you don't see it, trying Select Folder to browse for the device, or restart the software. When you're ready to proceed, click Start. You can see the progress of the scan across the top of the window, and 4DDiG lets you pause or even stop the scan at any time. This is useful if you spot the files you need to recover – after all, there's no point waiting for it to find data you don't need!

When the initial scan completes, read the brief instructions on finding the files then click Understood.

In the next screen, choose the Tree View or File View to browse through the recoverable data. In some cases, the filenames will be meaningless, but in others it should be possible to make out what the data is. Refer to the data type and date modified to help find what you're looking for.

When you find the data you want to recover, select the partition, one or more folders, or files, click Recover, and select a target destination. Note that this should not be the same drive, as it may overwrite the data you're trying to recover. Click OK to confirm.

Not sure about data? You can double click files to check a preview, although this is limited in the free trial version of Tenorshare 4DDiG Data Recovery.

Wait while the data is recovered, and you're done.

Deep Scan for Long Lost Data

If you need to know how to recover external hard drive data that doesn't appear in the standard scan, click Deep Scan.

This method displays data by filetype (not always accurate) and with allocated filenames based on filetype, rather than the original filename. Again, files can be previewed, and recovery works in the same way after selecting the files.

If you're not happy with the results of the deep scan, click Previous Scan Result to return to the original scan and work with recovering those files instead.

How to Recover Files From an External Hard Drive That Is Not Detected

Often, the drive you connect to your Windows PC will not be detected. So, how might Tenorshare 4DDiG help you to recover the data?

Incredibly, this software will detect drives that cannot be seen by the operating system. That means that you can hook up almost any external disk drive for recovery. Any corruption that prevents the operating system reading the drive is ignored by Tenorshare 4DDiG, enabling you to recover your lost data as explained above.

Impressed With Tenorshare 4DDiG? Grab a License!

Tenorshare 4DDiG for Windows is available with a monthly $45.95 license, ideal for occasional use. While it has auto-renewal, you can cancel at any time.

Meanwhile, the most popular option is the one-year license for $49.95. Clearly making good economic sense over the monthly option, this is currently discounted from $99.95, and again has auto-renewal and the option to cancel at any time.

Finally, Tenorshare 44DiG is also available with a lifetime license option, just $59.95. (For macOS prices, add $10 to each option.)

Note that all prices listed are before tax. Tenorshare also offers the option to enquire about a license for multiple PCs, with a tailored solution determined by your requirements.

Hard Drive Data Recovery Success With Tenorshare 4DDiG

Lost data doesn't have to be lost. External hard disk drives can receive quite a bit of wear and tear, whether from being moved around and knocked, or plugged and unplugged. USB cables can become damaged, corrupting data; disk drives might simply be accidentally formatted.

Tenorshare 4DDiG Data Recovery provides the tools you need to recover data from virtually any device, and with the deep clean option you can ensure that no digital stone is left unturned in your search for lost data on your external disk drive.

Whatever the case, you need to know how to recover data from your external hard drive. Tenorshare 4DDiG has everything you need for hard drive data recovery, using the steps above or this video: