Using an external drive to copy everything can take hours as you’ll have to essentially copy all data twice, and you’ll also be limited by the speed of your USB ports. If you’ve been using your Mac for a while, you might have hundreds of gigabytes of data to transfer. Recovering files directly from your Mac’s hard drive can also make sense if you’ve just bought a new PC and want to directly transfer all your old files to it. Some Mac models are also very difficult to disassemble and perform maintenance on, which could make it challenging to attach a second hard drive. If you have another Mac, but it doesn’t support a second hard drive, you might have to use a PC instead. If your Mac gets damaged in a way that prevents you from booting it, your only option for recovering your data may be to use a separate computer. When Would You Need to Recover Data from a Mac Hard Drive to a PC? This guide takes you through the process of recovering data from a Mac HDD to a PC. Although some macOS app files (Pages, Numbers) won’t automatically load, you can still transfer the information. It is not unusual for people to think that Mac files aren’t compatible with PC hard drives.
When Would You Need to Recover Data from a Mac Hard Drive to a PC?.