After the download.
Before the first scan.

01 / macOS

Open, confirm, password

1. Unpack the archive.Safari usually unzips FileRecoveryHero-latest-macOS.zip by itself; otherwise double-click it in your “Downloads” folder. You get File Recovery Hero.app. You may move it to “Applications”, but you do not have to.

2. First launch.macOS says, in essence: “‘File Recovery Hero’ is an app downloaded from the internet. Are you sure you want to open it?” Click “Open”. The app is signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple; macOS checks both itself before it shows this window. No detour through System Settings is needed. If you instead see a notice that Apple cannot check the app for malicious software, you do not have our archive: download it again from this domain and compare the checksum (section 03).

3. Selecting a drive — the password.As soon as you choose a memory card or a drive, macOS asks for your login password. The reason: a drive as a whole — block by block, not file by file — may only be opened with administrator rights. That is exactly how File Recovery Hero finds what the Finder no longer shows. The prompt opens the drive for reading only. If you cancel, the app reports “Administrator access was not granted.” and nothing happens. A disk image (IMG, DD, RAW, BIN) is an ordinary file and needs no prompt.

02 / Windows

Extract, SmartScreen, administrator

First, because it belongs to the picture: the Windows version is currently not code-signed, and we have not yet tested it on a real Windows device. Both facts are also stated on the releases page. That is why Windows shows two windows that signed programs do not show, or show differently.

1. Extract everything.Right-click FileRecoveryHero-latest-Windows-x64.zip, then “Extract All…”. Do not start the app from inside the ZIP window: it would be missing the MediaTools folder and the DLL files that must sit next to FileRecoveryHero.exe.

2. SmartScreen.On first launch a blue window appears with the heading “Windows protected your PC”. Click “More info” — only then does the “Run anyway” button appear. Why: SmartScreen warns about any file that neither carries a known signature nor has been downloaded often enough. The window says nothing about the file itself. Whether it is ours is something you check with the SHA-256 checksum in section 03 — ideally before you click.

3. Administrator prompt.Windows then asks, on a yellow background, in essence: “Do you want to allow this app from an unknown publisher to make changes to your device?” Click “Yes”. “Unknown publisher” and the yellow colour are how Windows always marks programs without a signature. “Changes” is the fixed wording of this prompt: File Recovery Hero needs the rights to read a drive as a whole, and writes nothing to it. Without “Yes” the app does not start.

The exact wording of these windows depends on your Windows version and system language.

03 / Verify

How you know it is our file

Both warnings are warnings from the system, not checks of the file. The check is yours: calculate the archive’s checksum and compare it with the table on the releases page. That table is generated from the same manifests as the download and cannot differ from it.

• macOS, Terminalshasum -a 256 ~/Downloads/FileRecoveryHero-latest-macOS.zip
• Windows, PowerShellGet-FileHash "$env:USERPROFILE\Downloads\FileRecoveryHero-latest-Windows-x64.zip" -Algorithm SHA256

If the sum matches, you have the published file bit for bit. If it does not: do not start it, download the archive again from file-recovery-hero.com and report the case to info@file-recovery-hero.com.

04 / Then

Scan for free, then decide

From here the path is the same on both systems: choose a drive or image, set the file types, start the scan. The list of results shows in full which files would be recoverable — without a license and without an account. Only the button “Activate license to rescue” asks for the key from your purchase email: 50 € once, ten years for the purchased main version, two of your own devices. Recovered files belong on a different physical drive, never back on the source.

Pricing and license → · Buy a license → · What we cannot do →

05 / Differences

If something looks different

• A window is missing or looks different. System version and language change the wording; the checksum decides, not the window.
• You are not an administrator. macOS and Windows then ask for the credentials of an administrator account. Without them File Recovery Hero cannot read a drive as a whole.
• The card does not appear in the list. Check the reader and the cable, or create an image on another computer. Whatever lies outside the software is on the limits page.
• Something is missing here. Write to info@file-recovery-hero.com and tell us which window you saw. There is no entitlement to technical support and statutory rights remain unaffected — your hints still improve this page.