Mac File Recovery – Undelete With Disk Drill PRO

While I’ve been reviewing a lot of MAC software lately, I’ve been reminded by Cleverfiles about a must-have utility for any computer, data recovery software. I already had some great undelete software for my Windows box, but I was leaving my Mac at risk. Over the weekend, I downloaded Disk Drill PRO for a review and although the bar was set high by my Windows counterpart, this Mac file recovery program performed well.

(Disk Drill PRO recovers files I deleted for my testing)

Disk Drill PRO Features

The first thing that caught my eye was the simplicity. From the install to the informative tutorial to protecting and recovering files, everything was incredibly easy and the user interface is clean and quick to navigate. Of course, the tutorial helped get me up and running quickly. The ease of use actually somewhat hid the fact that Disk Drill PRO is loaded up with a lot of useful features, some of which are below:

- Live preview
- S.M.A.R.T. monitoring
- Attach non-mountable images for recovery
- Deep or quick scan
- Recover deleted files
- Back up disks and partitions to DMG images
- Available in English, German, French, Spanish and Italian
- Password protect your backups

(Above is one of nine tutorial screens loaded with usage information and tips)

Most people will find the need for backups and file recovery, which are a must, but this software wouldn’t be complete without the ability to deep scan and the complete views of all drives and partitions. The DMG options are nice, too, but I was really pleased to see the live preview. When you work with a ton of images, these become critical files to restore and it’s troubling to restore files for hours only to find out that 90% of them were incomplete. With the live preview, you can preview any image that will restore correctly.

One of the unique features of Disk Drill is its Recover Valut technology. I told it to protect my main drive, so now it keeps an inventory of sorts of my file information. Should I ever find the need to recover lost data, Recover Vault remembers the file names and other details. When I crashed a drive a couple years back, I wound up recovering about 60GB of music files all named File00xxxxx.mp3. While it’s nice to get the music back, without technology like Recover Vault, I spent weeks listening to music and renaming files in my free time.

Working with external or internal hard drives, memory cards, iPod etc., Disk Drill worked really fast and without fail. It comes in a free version with the PRO version boasting some advanced features and extras, namely HFS/HFS+, FAT, NTFS data recovery and priority support. Both versions get the Recover Vault, but only Disk Drill PRO allows you to rescue files which were deleted long ago and even after formatting.

While the free version is free, the PRO will run you $89 (15% off with the coupon code JETCHE-DD).

Conclusions

Disk Drill PRO’s $89 price tag is about $20 more than I paid for my PC software, but it’s a lot nicer, easier to use, and seems to boast more features. It’s built to be used quickly by just about anyone, but hopefully you’ll never actually need it. Although you’ll need to weigh the cost against your personal need for the added features, the free version should be a minimum requirement for any Mac owner.

This is a sponsored review. As always, all opinions are honest.