The reason why this happen is because it is a new way of managing access to essential system files in OS X El Capitan which protects the system files and directories that are flagged for protection.

If you select the hard drive where is installed MacOS you will see a message similar to the below image. In the bottom left corner there is an option to do a Deep scan if you enable this option the application will do a heuristic process to try to recover old files even after a reformat, it also helps to get a better result but the scan process will take more time. In this screen you have to select the device where you want to recover the files, it can be your hard drive or external devices like a USB, SD cards, etc. The first screen is just a selection of categories, what are you looking recover, if you select everything the process will take more time. These are the steps to recover files: Select a category

I will show you how to recover data on your mac, in this example, I am using a USB device, is important to note that the time that takes recover a file could change depending on the device (speed, size, number of files, etc.). I actually impressed with some features despite the user interface is simple, and the installer is like 25MB, but the application work very good. You can download the software for free and test it, this way you can see if you are able to recover the files but until you get a license you can recover the files since this software is not free. This is a review for Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery, a data recovery software how the name said is for MacOS and it is useful in the situations where you need back files that you already deleted or very old files that are not anymore on your system, it works on different file systems like HFS, HFS+, FAT, ex-FAT and NTFS. A recovery software is a tool that everyone that has stuff they consider important should have.

I recovered the most important file of the project thanks to the browser cache. Two weeks ago I was working on a project and deleting unused files from the project, one of the folders that I deleted by mistake was the folder where I was working, that was a day of work and I didn't have a backup, at that moment I started the look in ways to recover that files.

Stellar data recovery for mac