We encounter Disk Drill weekly: on customers’ laptops, in their browsing history, occasionally in the story of how a recoverable drive turned into a harder one. Therefore, here is the view from the other side of the counter: what it does really well, what ‘free’ truly means, and the three times to close down the download page. No affiliation, no commission; we don’t sell software.
A clean user interface, truthful previews at no cost to you, and a scanning system with “healthy” media as its claim to fame. But none of these things will save a hard drive that is physically failing; this is the entire review.
At its core Disk Drill has an excellent carving and file-system scanning capability wrapped inside the most friendly user interface in the field, and friendliness matters at 11 pm with a formatted card in your hands. The outstanding virtue of Disk Drill is preview; the scan displays images and documents you will be able to open and verify before the licence prompt display; this makes purchasing Disk Drill a decision rather than a gamble. Disk Drill reads all of the relevant formats (NTFS, exFAT, FAT32, APFS, HFS+) and is able to carve hundreds of file types out of raw space; and (a feature we honestly believe rates high) its byte-for-byte drive backup is able to create a copy of a shaky but readable drive and scan the copy, which is exactly what a laboratory would do. If used as such on healthy or merely mistreated media, it is as effective as consumer data recovery can be.
The drive is failing physically. Dropping out mid-scan, clicking, buzzing and freezing the device: a deep scan is many hours of continuous reading to a device that has already been abused and begging for its life. We receive drives with a recoverable data amount that dropped from scan one to scan three. The files were on an internal SSD. Most modern systems automatically TRIM deleted blocks (within seconds); Disk Drill will spend hours searching through your drive and then give you file names that have nothing but empty space where there used to be files. It isn’t Disk Drill’s fault; it simply can’t fight against the laws of physics. The stakes are irreplaceable. A business’ financial records or a family’s wedding photos deserve only one careful professional attempt at recovery instead of a consumer-based recovery program on the first go-round, because the first attempt is when you get the best odds. As far as each of these situations is concerned, the right thing to do is run the free diagnostic prior to running any scans so you know exactly what situation you are dealing with.
And if you’re looking around at all of the other options? PhotoRec offers free carving (in a plain-looking interface) and we have a free-software guide and a Mac shortlist to help you map the terrain.
Yes, as software on good hardware, it only reads and does not write to the drive it is looking at unless told otherwise. The real concern about safety is not the application itself, but the condition of the device it is trying to access. Hours of attempting to deep scan a failing or dead drive can cause damage to the drive, regardless of how “safe” the application is. If you’ve deleted the wrong things from a working drive, go ahead and run a scan. However, if the drive is failing, create an image of the drive on a workbench.
Partly; the free plan is useful in some cases. For example, on a Windows machine it can restore up to 500MB which is enough to save some small files. In contrast, on an Apple Mac, the free version allows users to search through all your files and preview them (to show that they were there), but does not allow users to actually restore anything; that requires the full version. Both ways, however, the previews are as good as any of the features of the software because they let you know if something is recoverable or not before you spend money.
A file’s skeletal remains (i.e., the entry) can be recovered even when it has lost all of its original content (living body). The entries in a file system persist long after they’ve had part or most of their contents overwritten. This is why many recovery programs list the name of every entry in a directory, but cannot recover any of that entry’s data. On removable media like external hard drives and memory cards, additional time and expertise may allow some or all of this “lost” data to be recovered. On modern solid state disk (SSD) devices where TRIM is enabled, no amount of time or money will ever recover the data from an entry once that entry has been marked as deleted by the operating system.
We offer a complimentary 48 hour diagnostic test in our lab, including a true assessment of whether software even stood a chance, and a written quote prior to performing any services.