Recovering data from an external hard drive not recognized by Mac

I finally started prepping to upgrade my computer after a solid 10-year run, which meant going through old storage — including an external hard drive I hadn't touched in years. It was originally formatted for Windows, and when I plugged it into my Mac, it wasn't recognized at all. I needed to recover the data before I could safely reformat it.

I used iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac to scan the drive. The interface was clean and easy to navigate even though I hadn't used recovery software before, and the deep scan took a while (as expected for a drive that old) but came back with 112 GB of recoverable data. One thing I didn't love: it didn't let me preview files before recovering them, so I ended up restoring everything and sorting through it after the fact rather than being able to cherry-pick what I actually needed.

The most impressive part was just how much it pulled back from a drive I'd basically written off, files I'd genuinely forgotten existed, some of which turned out to be critical. It also let me reformat the drive afterward for both Windows and Mac, which matters since I toggle between both for work, school, and personal use.

My advice to other Mac users: don't assume an old external drive is dead just because it's not recognize, it might just be a formatting mismatch.