JPG or JPEG files are those that store your treasured photos. Every snapshot taken with your phone, or spontaneous selfie, or family portraits–the whole album of your memory is stored in JPEG files on a disc somewhere. The scary part about this is that these discs and cards are susceptible to losing data or becoming corrupted and so separating you from your memories and mementos forever.

Well, not forever. There are a few steps to take.

Let’s look first at why people lose their pictures.

Corruption: File corruption occurs through innumerable means, but it will generally make the corrupted files inaccessible.

Human Error: Sometimes you think you’ve saved something when you haven’t, or you hit the wrong button on a keyboard short cut, or you think you look really fat in a picture, delete, and then instantly feel regret. Whatever the reason, human error is maybe the most common source of last data.

Transfer and Formatting Errors:

When moving files from one place to the next you may be informed that a particular file is incorrectly formatted. Similarly, when transferring files from a camera or phone to your computer, files may get lost in transit.

What to Do?

Recovering your JPEG files on a Mac is surprisingly simple.

1) Download a File Recovery Program for Mac

2) Run a scan for the program. If you don’t know specifically where your file was located, just scan your entire computer and wait.

3) Preview the files to find the one you’re looking for. After getting deleted, filenames are destroyed, so this step may take the longest.

4) Restore the file by clicking “restore”

5) Save the file to an external drive if you plan on recovering other files from a similar location.

And that’s the whole kit and kaboodle! This process should work for the majority of instances when you lose data. So don’t hesitate–download some recovery software now, before you find yourself in a position where you really need it but don’t have it!