HEEELLLLP /Trojan $Recycle.bin on a External Hard Disk mac formated

Hello
I need you help. We are doing a round the world tour with my family and yesterday I planned to share stupidely my photos stocked on my external WD hard disk formatted for my mac on the PC of a friend. Of course, she could not see my pictures on my EHD but on top she infected my EHD with a malware $Recycle.bin.!

When I plugged again my EHD on my mac all my pics, videos and docs were gone…only 2 files left : $Recycle.bin and system.information.
Nevertheless it seems my data are still on my HDE when I read the information it says that 500Ga are occupied on the 2 Ta…

Please how should l do to get back all my files ???

Please help I’m desperate

Best regards
Stephanie

I’m sorry you lost your photos, let me try to guide you the best I can to a solution…

That’s not malware, those are hidden files that Windows writes on all disks. Because windows did not recognise the file system it likely asked to format it, to which someone said OK, thus making the photos dissappear.

This not really a problem for this forum, it’s not malware related, I suggest you contact an Apple Certified technician and see what they can do, or one of the many Data Recovery Services that salvage data from broken drives.

Note : If you googled for $Recycle.bin you might have found a link that talks about a virus. However it’s a virus that likely pretends to be the legitimate $Recycle.bin folder as this folder is indeed present in Windows machines by default.