The best way to recover files from an external hard drive on a Mac for free is through a backup copy you have previously created. If that turns out to be the case, then it’s time to explore other recovery solutions. Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee that your files will be present in the Trash folder, especially if the option to automatically remove items from the folder after 30 days is enabled on your system.
Each Mac storage device has its own Trash folder, so this step is critical.
To the best of my knowledge, the only way to remove the password is to erase your USB external hard drive. The password that you set on your USB external hard drive is used to encrypt the data that gets stored on that drive. Thus, I wrote some instructions and I’m sure other people have as well.
For whatever reason, they don’t happen to provide instructions on how to replace an USB external hard drive when it fails. Read more about backup, external, hard drive, mac, replace, Time Machine.Īpple provides simple instructions that cover how to initially setup Time Machine and restore files from it. It’ll likely take many hours to finish since it needs to backup everything on your Mac.