Disk Drill from Clever Files-get it!

Disk Drill Basic and Disk Drill Pro

By Thomas Briant

Our user group recently received a request from Clever Files, the developer of Disk Drill, to test it out and give them an honest opinion.

Tom’s honest opinion: Download it for the great deletion protection features in the Basic version and consider upgrading to the Pro Version for the file recovery tools needed for when you deleted precious files.

The Basic Version:

The Basic Version is a teaser version with lots of pop-ups urging you to upgrade. You get a taste of this program’s power when you decide to protect a partition with the Recovery Vault with a blue shield icon.

With a few mouse clicks I protected the Users folder of my test system, which Disk Drill selects by default. You can add more folders to protect.

I then ran a simple test of the Recovery Vault. I deleted a picture from the Pictures folder and then emptied the Trash. I then went back to Disk Drill to try to recover it. In a few minutes, Disk Drill recovered the picture with the original name in the original file structure. I save the picture and surrounding folders to my Desktop, as Disk Drill warns you about the consequences of restoring a file to the same level from which you deleted it. This feature sold me on Disk Drill

I then tried another feature of the free version, backing up a partition to a disk image. You would use this to back up an ailing drive’s contents to a healthy disk drive of larger capacity. Disk Drill warns you if you try to back a partition to a smaller drive or partition.

You can scan for lost data on unprotected partitions to see if you have a chance of recovery from the Basic version. If you find the data, then you want to spend the money for a license code.

The Pro Version

Once you upgrade to the Pro version, you can recover files on unprotected drives. You can scan in two modes: Quick scan for recently deleted files and deep scan for the stuff you thought was lost forever.

I took an unprotected partition, added a folder of pictures to it. I then deleted the folder and emptied the Trash.

I then ran Disk Drill in Basic Mode. A Quick Scan found the missing pictures. The Preview feature showed them to be the ones I wanted. When I attempted Recovery, up popped the message that I needed to upgrade to the Pro version. So I entered the Pro license code that Clever Files sent to me and attempted recovery.

Complete success! I recovered all the pictures with their original names and with the same file structure.

The Competition:

Clever Files is based in Dallas, Texas. Any mention of Mac utility software from Texas must include a mention of Alsoft’s Disk Warrior. So does Disk Drill compete with Disk Warrior?

Disk Drill specifically goes after the file recovery market, while Disk Warror goes after the drive resurrection market. Disk Drill doesn’t pretend to restore life to sick disks, like Disk Warrior can.

Disk Warrior doesn’t offer any free features. You have two choices, buy it or leave it, with that program.

Disk Drill also offers the ability to recover data from Windows formatted drives. Disk Warrior works strictly on Mac disks.

Conclusion:

If you have ever deleted a file that you needed to get back, get Disk Drill for the Recovery Vault feature so that you won’t do it again. Get Disk Drill Pro for the recovery of files on partitions that you didn’t protect, like SD cards for your camera.