from Hacker News

WARNING: DriveGenius/DrivePulse may be malware, it's a pain to remove it and prevent it from instantly relaunching itself, and I'm still not sure it's gone completely.

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I just bought a new external disk and tried to transfer everything from an older disk to the new one:

• I MOVE'd folders instead of COPYing them to easily keep track of what was already copied (and to avoid Finder annoyances when trying to merge folders instead of overwriting)

• In a moment of stress, instead of deleting the volumes on the older disk (to free space on it for something else) I accidentally deleted the freshly-copied volume on the new disk! :(

So the situation is:

• APFS volume on NewDisk accidentally deleted via Disk Utility.

• APFS folders on OldDisk implicitly deleted via a Move operation in Finder (bypassing the Trash)

• Both disks are from LaCie, use a USB-C connection on both ends, formatted as APFS, and they are not SSDs.

• Neither disks have Time Machine protection.

• I have done [almost?] no write operations since the deletion as far as I am aware.

I want to recover either the NewDisk volume or the original OldDisk files.

Trying to find APFS recovery solutions seems to be a search term that many unscrupulous companies like to prey upon. So far, "Stellar Data Recovery" seems the most promising but I'm not sure if I should spend the $80 on it unless there's nothing better.

Does anybody have some experience that could help? Thanks in advance!