iDear Media Recovery lets you scan your drives for deleted files. The application can scan both internal and external drives for multimedia files that you have previously deleted or lost. During a scan, you will see how many hard drive blocks have been scanned and how many are left, and the number of files that have already been recovered. In my case, after a few minutes, the application had already recovered over twenty thousand files, which is a lot. Unfortunately, there is no way to tell the application what type of file you are looking for, which would make the whole process faster. You can cancel a scan at any time and look through the files that have already been found, or you can complete the scan for the best results. On my Mac, with a 500-gigabyte hard drive, a full scan takes 1 hour and 40 minutes. The scan time depends largely on the speed of your hard drive. After a scan has been completed or cancelled, you can browse the results to see if the file that you were looking for was found. Results are grouped by type and by extension. Some files can be previewed but I couldn't preview any video files, not even MOV files, which are natively supported by the Mac.
The trial version of this app lets you scan any hard drive on your computer and preview the results, but you can recover any files.
