i accidently installed big sur on my external harddrive and now i cant access the files that were on it

[sunnysky100]

I accidently installed big sur on my external hard drive and now i cant access the files that were on it. My husband ran EaseUS recovery software on the hard drive and found the files, and then recovered the missing files to another hard drive, but the files will not open, it says they are damaged or can't be opened. How can I access my files?

 

[me55]

They're gone.

 

[TETENAL]

Installing Big Sur on an external drive should not erase any files on that drive. It would have converted that drive to APFS however. Can you boot Big Sur from that drive? Do you see your files when booted into Big Sur from that drive?

 

[sunnysky100]

I accidently installed big sur on my external hard drive and now i cant access the files that were on it. My husband ran EaseUS recovery software on the hard drive and found the files, and then recovered the missing files to another hard drive, but the files will not open, it says they are damaged or can't be opened. How can I access my files?

 

[sunnysky100]

SUCCESS!!! If anyone else is having this issue: I was able to access the files that were hidden on my external hard drive, by downloading Wondershare's Recoverit. (I tried a few others that did not work for me). It allowed me to preview the files so I knew they were there.
When I could see them on the hard drive, I bought the software and was able to recover all the files.
The whole process took a few days but I am so happy I got everything back.

 

[ght56]

I am glad to hear that it worked out! One thing I would recommend moving forward is keeping those files on at least two hard drives, and, ideally three, with one being stored in a different physical place (or just on cloud storage). Hard drives can and commonly do mechanically fail beyond just software-related issues. Having multiple redundant copies helps prevent data loss and can avoid the thousands of dollars that data recovery can cost in the case of mechanical failure. There are some programs, like Carbon Copy Cloner, that can automate some of this.

 

[shafez]

Accidently?!!!

 

[shitzerblitzer]

I had this same problem and thought my files were lost forever. I finally figured out what happened. The files got relocated to a folder for some reason. On my drive they're in this folder path Users/Shared/Relocated Items/Security/
In the Relocated Items folder there was this document explaining why the files relocated. Anyways, hope this helps someone!