Feb 22, 2021 • Filed to: Windows Computer Solutions • Proven solutions

• Disk Drill Pro For Windows
• Download Disk Drill Pro Free
• Disk Drill Pro Cost Software
• Disk Drill Pro Cost Free
• Disk Drill Pro Keygen

Is Disk Drill a free data recovery program? What does Disk Drill do? How to use disk drill recover deleted files? There are many questions like these about Disk Drill when you are hoping to restore your precious files with the program. This post will explain all the questions aboutDisk Drill free data recovery softwarefor Windows and Mac.

Disk Drill is slow, fails to detect the majority of the files on the volume and fails to reconstruct a directory tree. Totally unfit to recover data from a RAW or quick formatted NTFS volume. I can only come t the conclusion that Disk Drill is not suited to recover data from a RAW or quick formatted NTFS volume.

• A lifetime license to Disk Drill Pro 4 is worth over $170 for Windows, but this week Tech Deals is offering the license for just $39. By the way, Disk Drill Pro is also available for macOS at the.
• Review of Disk Drill. Find Disk Drill pricing plans, features, pros, cons & user reviews.

Part 1. What's Disk Drill？

Disk Drill is a freeware fordata recoverythat possesses a clean and easy to understand user interface, coupled with an efficient data recovery algorithm. This provides an easy way for users to scan the PC for lost, damaged, or corrupted files and preview them before undergoing the recovery process.

• It helpsretrieve lost files from partitionsthat have been formatted or have failed to mount.
• It can scanhard drives,partitionsthat have been deleted or lost. External memory devices such as flash drives and SD cards can also be run through the Disk Drill for scanning and data recovery.
• Disk Drill is also able to pull out data from hard drives that have crashed.
• There are different scan options and scan capabilities that Disk Drill can do. For scan options,quick and deep scanscan be made to look for lost, deleted, corrupted, or damaged files.
• Sorting and scanning by file type are also possible with Disk Drill.

Disk Drill is offered in 2 versions: Mac and Windows. These 2 versions are slightly different in data recovery.

Disk Drill for Windows

Like Disk Drill for Mac, the Windows version supports data scanning from various file systems, including NTFS/NTFS5, HFS/HFS+/HFSX, FAT/FAT32/exFAT, EXT3/EXT4 and more. It can recover data from formatted drive, too. However, Forensic features are missing in Disk Drill for Windows. Moreover, Disk Drill 4 for Windows allows users to recover up to 500MB data for free.

Disk Drill for Mac

Disk Drill for Mac can preview and recover protected data with all recovery methods. The deleted files can be labeled by metadata and previewed by thumbnails. iOS & Android Data Recovery are also supported in the Mac versions. However, in Deep Scan, only 300 file signatures can be scanned out, while 400 file signatures can be scanned in the Windows version.

Part 2. Is Disk Drill Safe?

So many features are listed to show what Disk Drill Data Recovery is. But the most important question should be 'Is it a safe program to use?' Yes, Disk Drill can be used torecover deleted or lost files on computer safely. We tested the Disk Drill on 3 computers, respectively Windows 10, Windows 7, and MacBook Pro. When running the software on the computers, it works normally without causing any harm to them and hard drive data.

During the test, we also checked the computer condition, especially in the virus and malware infection. And the anti-virus software told that everything went normally.

Aside from this, the software has a Recovery Fault feature that protects partitions and consequently the files saved from within these parts. This feature makes it easier to recover data should they become corrupted or deleted.

Part 3. Is Disk Drill Really Free

Disk Drill Free Data Recovery claims that it is free for all the users to get data back. However, is it free? The answer is no. Both available for Mac and Windows, Disk Drill Data Recovery has 3 pricing plans, namely basic, pro, and enterprise.

Disk Drill Basic

Usually, Disk Drill Basic is regarded as Disk Drill Free Data Recovery. It has different recovery limitations for Windows and Mac users. Disk Drill Free Data Recovery only supports Mac users toscan and preview files for free. What if you want to recover data on a Mac computer? You have no other choice but to purchase Disk Drill Pro for Mac.

However, Windows users of Disk Drill Basic can not only free scan and preview files but recover up to 500 MB data for free on a Windows computer.

Disk Drill Pro

Disk Drill Pro is the paid version of Disk Drill Basic. By purchasing the Pro version, you can remove the limits of data recovery in the free version and unlock more features, such as rebuilding HFS+, searching lost partitions.

How much does Disk Drill Pro for Mac cost? It is $89 for 1 user up to 3 Macs according to the Disk Drill website. You can also further upgrade it to the lifetime license by paying an extra 29 dollars.

Disk Drill Enterprise

The Enterprise version is the premium version of Disk Drill for business uses. It supports data recovery for up to 10 devices.

Part 4. Disk Drill Review After Test

After learning what Disk Drill is, let's have a snapshot of its advantages and disadvantages.

What We Like

• Disk Drill has a concise user interface that allows even beginners to use the program without hassle.
• It supports data recovery on multiple platforms — this means that Disk Drill is compatible with devices that run with Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android operating systems.
• Support for multiple file types and file systems are available. Even obscure file types can be recognized by thisfile recovery software.
• Disk Drill has an impressive scanning speed. A partition with 500 GB can be run for only an hour using the deep scan function.
• Scans can be stopped, paused, and resumed at your convenience. The use of this software is flexible and easy because you take control of the scan time and schedule.
• The Recovery Vault, a very useful feature of Disk Drill, helps protect your data from total loss because it creates metadata that acts as an extended Recycle Bin for your device.
• It boasts more than file recovery — a full partition recovery is possible with Disk Drill.

What We Don't Like

• The file details aren’t effectively shown, so you do not get information about a file’s quality before recovery.
• Disk Drill only supports the preview and recovery of fewer than 400 types and formats of data, below the average.
• There is no portable version for Disk Drill. Installation of the software is required before you can run it and recover files. This increases the risk of file overwriting, thereby losing the data permanently.
• There is only a 500 MB of file limit for recovery in the free version. This means that you might not be able to retrieve all the files you need, especially if they come in a video format.
• Some users find bugs like difficulty startup of the software, and some incidences report app crashing.
• Some users also complained about staff support because it takes quite a while for them to respond to queries.

Part 5. How to Use Disk Drill Data Recovery?

To use Disk Drill, you would need to install the software first on your computer and run it accordingly, since there is no portable version of this. Here are the steps in recovering lost data using Disk Drill.

Step 1Download Disk Drill from their website and install the program by following the instructions.

Step 2Run Disk Drill once it finishes installing in your PC. This will show you all of the drives found in the computer system.

Step 3Choose the specific driver that contains the lost files and click the 'Recover' button.

Step 4After the scan is completed, the window will show all the recoverable files found in that drive.

Step 5Sort through them and review the files that you need to retrieve. You can also opt to recover all files by checking boxes to ensure that no lost or deleted file is missed.

Step 6Wait for the recovery task to finish!

There is no other way to see if Disk Drill works than to try it by yourself. To recover files and ensure that you don’t suffer from crippling data loss, avail of the services offered by Disk Drill. If you want another alternative software that does data recovery efficiently, you may also tryRecoverit Free Data Recovery, also available as a freeware and power-packed unlike most other data recovery software out there. What we most like is that Recoverit supports to recover more than 1000 types and formats of data from all devices.

Free Recover Data

Top Recovery Freeware

Top Recovery Solutions

Disk Drill Review: The other week I was given a PRO license for Disk Drill Pro by my buddy Luke Coughey from https://www.recoveryforce.com/. Yes, this is legal, he was offered licenses to give away for promotional purposes. I have looked at Disk Drill in the past and it appears not much has changed since. Which isn’t a good thing.

UPDATE AUG 22, 2019

Clever Files released version 4 of the data recovery product Disk Drill.

It’s good to see they stepped up to 64 bits but they don’t seem to be benefiting from it. It’s just as sluggish as the previous version, their scan modes are confusing, it seems a tad faster but hardly significant and results are way below average.

Scenario: Windows 10, NTFS, 800.000+ files.

Something as simple as loading an existing directory tree on a healthy volume (called allocating existing data in Disk Drill) takes longer than for ReclaiMe or UFS Explorer to detect all data in a RAW state! The latter two parse the complete tree of a RAW volume within a matter of a few minutes while Disk Drill takes over 30 minutes (was then stopped) to parse a healthy file system.

Comments regarding version 4 are added to tests below.

Update March 13, 2019

Some complaints in the comment section last couple of weeks about DiskDrill not working and refusal to give a refund. It is good to be aware of the CleverFiles non refund policy. In all fairness, it is in their EULA:

But they know as well as I do 9 out of 10 will not read that. IMO, a non refund policy should be stated on their website. Refund policies are a ‘thing’ I am struggling with too I must admit. If people just buy and try rather than try and buy, it means I lose money without getting anything in return. At the same time the user has a working license key. So I feel you can’t throw this all on the plate of the software writer/seller. Seems like common sense to me that if the option is available, to first try, and if it works for you, then buy.

Disk Drill popularity

Disk Drill appears to be a popular tool. I do not have hard numbers to back up this claim, but I see people recommending it on a regular basis in various forums and other online communities. I can forgive an end user a positive review if he has nothing to compare against.

Also review sites often place Disk Drill in their top 10’s or even top 5’s. Fact that ‘professional’ review sites rate the program so high makes me wonder about their objectivity. However a fair amount of reviews covers the Mac version. Maybe it performs better than it’s Windows counter part. Or maybe it is due to the fact that there are not many data recovery tools for the Mac. In this post I will only cover the Windows version and I have no idea how the Mac and Windows versions compare.

Like many other data recovery software vendors, CleverFiles offers a free version of it’s product Disk Drill. Be sure to try that version because purchasing the Pro version is irreversible: all sales are considered final. FWIW I consider the latter reasonably fair with regards to recovery and repair type tools in general.

As with competitors offering free versions, the free part has to be taken with a grain of salt. Typically the amount of data that can be recovered is very limited, somewhere about 1 or 2 GB. Disk Drill free allows you to select and recover 500 MB. Granted, if you need to quickly undelete that one document you have been working on so hard then this may be enough, but in general I consider the free quota nothing but a cheap marketing trick. If the damage is more serious, like you accidentally formatted a whole volume, then the free part is as good at nothing.

It also helps if you indeed can quickly recover the deleted file but you will be disappointed when you hope to be able to achieve this using Disk Drill. Scanning your disk with this file recovery software is like watching grass grow.

Disk Drill review, scenarios

I will test Disk Drill against 3 typical and common scenarios:

Disk Drill Pro For Windows

1. Recover an accidentally deleted file, or undelete.
2. Unformat type recovery: After a volume turned RAW or was accidentally formatted.
3. Photo Recovery: Recover photos from a corrupted SD Card (JPEG photos).

Quick undelete a file from the c: drive

If you need to undelete a file, specially from the Windows c: drive, speed is of the essence unless you’re able to ‘freeze’ the drive: Turn off PC > attach drive to different PC > scan and recover from the slaved drive. Reality is, 9 out of 10 people will run the software from their c: drive. So, you need to be quick before the deleted file is overwritten.

Download Disk Drill Pro Free

Scenario: Windows 10, NTFS, 800.000+ files.

I fire up Disk Drill > select the c: drive > change recovery mode to ‘Quick’.

After waiting 1.5 hours and only a few thousand files detected, and NO indication at all with regards to percentage scanned so far or an ETA, I break off the scan. A typical free undelete type tool like DiskTuna’s own undelete tool or Recuva will recover such files (if recoverable) within a few minutes.

Version 2. My conclusion is that Disk Drill is completely unfit for undelete type recovery.

Version 4. Quick undelete test was a lot quicker and found about the same amount of files as FileScavenger.

Unformat type recovery: recover data from formatted or RAW volume.

Scenario: NTFS volume, approx 600 GB, 800.000+ files. I go with default recovery which includes the quick and the deep scan. Of course this will not increase speed compared to the quick scan. After over an hour of scanning Disk Drill suddenly offers some information on it’s progress! It claims it has been scanning for 3 minutes and remaining scan time is around 2+ hours (although fluctuating up to 3 hrs):

In general, with this type of damage and recovery, the tool should be able to reconstruct a more or less complete directory tree + file names are recoverable too. Reference tools like ReclaiMe are able to reconstruct a directory tree of the same drive in less than 2 minutes.

ReclaiMe detects all files + complete directory structure in less than 2 minutes!

Finally done!

After 2+ hours of scanning Disk Drill presents it’s final result:

In total it detects 146989 ‘items’ (out of 800.000+ expected). Of those only 20407 are sorted in the directory tree and the majority, 126582 are detected by file signature. So the latter is without original file names or their original folders! This is an extremely poor result! Not only it failed to detect the majority of the files at all, it fails to reconstruct a directory structure spectacularly. Even Deep Scan, which I assume is a signature or RAW scan, fails. For example, the volume contains 100’s of intact Canon RAW photos (CR2) of which it manages to locate only 4!

There’s more totally weird behavior: If I search for ‘*.CR2’ no files are found. Using ‘CR2’ as search phrase lists the 4 CR2 files but also a folder full of JPEGs.

Disk Drill is slow, fails to detect the majority of the files on the volume and fails to reconstruct a directory tree. Totally unfit to recover data from a RAW or quick formatted NTFS volume.

Version 2. I can only come t the conclusion that Disk Drill is not suited to recover data from a RAW or quick formatted NTFS volume.

Version 4. I got the same result with version 4, it just finished a tad quicker.

Scenario 3: Photo Recovery

For this I use a sector-by-sector disk image of a SD Card. Disk Drill allows you to ‘attach’ a disk image and then offers that as location to scan in the disk list. If I go with the default scan the program crashes reproducible.

Only after I switch to deep scan, which causes the program not to scan for lost partitions, I can get it to scan. The program finds 1000 files: actually double the amount but files under the directory tree (DCIM) and RAW files (deep scan) are the same. So for each file exactly one duplicate. This is the same amount of files as the ones on the reference recovery software. Free software such as PhotoRec can recover the files as well (Tested this already in the past).

Disk Drill: satisfactory results with photo recovery

Version 2. Conclusion: Disk Drill performs satisfactory when used for photo recovery once you work around the quirks.

Disk Drill Review Conclusion

I am under the impression Disk Drill is a popular tool among end users. After reviewing it I sincerely wonder why as it is far from the best solution available: Disk Drill is extremely slow compared to other tools, delivers poor results and is buggy at some points.

Losing data is often a significant interruption of whatever you were doing. Recovering data with as minimal fuzz as possible is then desired. The file recovery software should be easy to use, quick and preferably recovers the complete directory structure and file names. At too many points Disk Drill fails to meet these requirements. With all that in mind, the price of $89 for Disk Drill against $79.95 for ReclaiMe, the latter being far superior, is plain ridiculous!

My conclusion is that Disk Drill (Windows) 2.0 isn’t worth your time or money.

However, version 4 is slightly better! I still do not like it:

• I think it’s interface is confusing
• It is and feels sluggish from setup to using it
• Setup also wants a reboot which I think is very undesirable when you downloaded the tool to quickly undelete a file
• Unformat type recovery doesn’t cut it! I consider this a major part of a generic file recovery tool.
• If compared to other tools it certainly isn’t the best choice

Disk Drill Pro Cost Software

Specially when you compare Disk Drill to competing tools, the difference is night and day. Confusing vs. simple and straight forward to use. Sluggish vs. snappy and responsive.

Disk Drill Pro Cost Free

Disclosure

Disk Drill Pro Keygen

I am affiliated with some file recovery products, including Disk Drill, listed on this website. This means I earn a small commission when I refer someone to specific software and that someone decides to purchase that software. However, if I think a product is bad then I will say so. If I think a product is good, whether I am affiliated to it or not, I will say that too.