How to recover deleted/lost files from Fusion drive on Mac?

Posted by Tim to Mac Data Recovery Tips on February 11th, 2020

Fusion drive is Apple Inc's name for its implementation of a hybrid drive. Apple's implementation combines a hard disk drive with a SSD and presents it as a single Core Storage managed logical volume with the space of both drives combined.

Some Mac computers such as iMac and Mac Mini provide the option of Fusion drive, which is an integration of solid-state drive and hard disk drive. The former provides high-speed read-write performance while the latter high storage capacity. The speed of a Fusion drive is greatly faster than an HDD but comparatively slower than a pure SSD. The consolidation of the two drives is quite effective in maintaining an equilibrium in cost and benefits (speed & capacity) to Mac users.

Fusion drive

While using a Fusion drive, it is a big problem that Mac users encounter data loss problems, we will introduce how to recover lost data from Mac Fusion drive.

How to recover deleted/lost data from Mac Fusion drive?

Fusion drive appears as two hard disks instead of one in the Finder, if this is the case, two hard disks are not working as a Fusion drive. This can happen if you have split the Fusion drive or replaced any of the devices of the Fusion drive, so data recovery from a Fusion drive is little complicated as compared to pure SSD or HDD.

Solution 1: Recover lost data from a Time Machine backup

If you have backed up your Fusion drive using Time Machine, you can recover lost data from the backup drive. It is the best method against any data loss disaster.

Solution 2: Recover deleted/lost files from a Fusion drive

iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery is a professional Mac data recovery software which can recover deleted files even emptied from Trash, recover lost data from unreadable drive, recover lost data from unmounted drive, recover lost data from deleted/lost APFS volume, recover lost data from Fusion drive, recover lost data from formatted drive, etc. on macOS Catalina, Mojave, High Sierra, Sierra and Mac OS X 10.11/10.10/10.9/10.8.

Follow the below steps to recover deleted/lost files from the Fusion drive:

Step 1: Download, install and launch iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac on your computer.

Step 2: Select the Fusion drive and click Next to scan deleted/lost files.

Mac Data Recovery Software

If you see the Fusion drive has been split into two hard disks in disk utility, please go to Solution 3.

Fusion drive

Step 3: If the Fusion drive is encrypted APFS, you need to enter the password of the encrypted APFS drive.

Enter the password to scan lost files from APFS drive with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac

Step 4: iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is scanning the deleted/lost files from the Fusion drive.

Scan deleted/lost data from Fusion drive

Step 5: After the scan completes, select one file and click the Preview button in the preview mode.

Recover deleted/lost data from Fusion drive

iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac can preview the documents, photos and play the videos, audios, etc. in the preview mode so that you can see if your lost files are recoverable.

File preview of iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac

Step 6: Select the needed files and then click Recover to start data recovery.

Solution 3: Recover lost data from a split Fusion drive

If you see the Fusion drive has been split into two hard disks as below in disk utility, please follow the below solution to recover lost data from a split Fusion drive.

Fusion drive

Step 1: Download, install and launch iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac on your computer.

Step 2: Click "Find Lost APFS Partitions" on the top right corner.

Step 3: Select the large hard disk and click Next to scan the APFS partition.

Step 4: Once your previous APFS partition is found, select it and click Next to scan lost data.

If the previous APFS partiton is encrypted, you need to enter the password at this step.

Step 5: iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is scanning the lost data from large hard disk.

Step 6: After the scan completes, select one file and click the Preview button in the preview mode.

Recover deleted/lost data from Fusion drive

iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac can preview the documents, photos and play the videos, audios, etc. in the preview mode so that you can see if your lost files are recoverable.

File preview of iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac

Step 7: Select the needed files and then click Recover to start data recovery.