The day my drive stopped opening, and why Retrova is free

The drive

Years of my work were on one portable SSD. One day I plugged it in and macOS refused to mount it. The drive was there, but its APFS volume wouldn’t open.

The paywall

So I did what everyone does and searched for recovery software. Every option was a subscription or a paid licence. The free versions would scan my drive, show me my own files, and then stop: a 100 MB limit here, a 2 GB cap there. Pay first, then you get your files back.

It felt wrong. They were my files, on my drive, and the software could clearly read them.

The script

I’m a developer, so I started reading how APFS actually stores things. The damage was in the volume’s bookkeeping, not in the files themselves. I wrote a small rescue tool that opened the drive strictly read-only, found the newest part of the file system that still held together, and walked the folder tree from there. Then it copied everything off.

It worked. My files came back.

The questions after

Getting files back was only half of it. Then the questions started. Is every copy really intact, or did some files come back damaged? Why is my backup drive suddenly full? Which of these folders are copies of each other? Each answer became a tool: byte-for-byte verify, a space map, a duplicate finder, cleanup. Together they became Retrova.

Why it’s free, and open

Retrova is free for anyone rescuing their own files. No trial, no account, no recovery limit. Nobody should have to start a subscription to get their own photos back.

It’s also open source under the AGPL-3.0. A tool you trust with your only copy of something should be one you can check, and now anyone can read exactly what it does to a drive: it reads, and it never writes.

Keeping it going

Retrova is built by one person in Guwahati, India. If it saves your files, you can support it, star it on GitHub, or just tell someone who’s staring at a drive that won’t open.

— Jishnu