

This will increase your chances of successfully recovering it. Important: As soon as you notice that a file has been mistakenly replaced, stop using the disk on which the file is located. It will be possible to recover an accidentally replaced file on your Mac with the help of such software only if the file is still physically located on your disk and hasn’t been overwritten with new data. It is a reliable and versatile data recovery tool that can be used for restoring overwritten files on Windows and Mac computers. A great example of such software is Disk Drill. Using data recovery software is one of the quickest and hassle-free ways of recovering overwritten files on your device. Here are step-by-step instructions for each file recovery method. You should choose a suitable method depending on your situation. In general, if you accidentally overwrote a file, there are four main ways you can recover it: with the help of data recovery software, via Time Machine, from a cloud backup, or using your file history. 4 Methods to Recover Replaced Files on Mac However, there are many different file systems and implementations of them, so if you want to recover a file replaced by another file with the same name, it is best to stop using the disk where that file is located and start the recovery process as soon as possible. In this process, the original file doesn’t actually get erased (it just stays ignored), making it possible to recover it. When you overwrite a file, the drive performs wear leveling, and therefore there are high chances that the other file will be saved to a different location.

This is especially true with modern SSDs. The new file gets saved somewhere on the disk.The original file gets flagged by macOS as deleted.Then you get asked whether you want to replace it with the new one and if you click Yes instead of No, it may seem like the old file is gone forever.īut what happens to the replaced file? Overall, here’s how file overwriting works: It can happen insanely fast: you create a new file called, for example, invoice.docx, and when saving the file, it occurs to you that there already is a file with such a name on your Mac. 4 Methods to Recover Replaced Files on Mac.
