Disk Drill is available in three editions. The free Basic version offers recovery up to 100MB at no cost with all recovery methods and a backup feature for failing disks. Disk Drill Pro recovers without any limit and supports all popular file systems (FAT32, NTFS, exFAT, EXT3/4) and more than 300+ known file formats at a price for 89$. The Enterprise-Version can be used as a multi-user license and adds priority support from software-maker cleverfiles.com for the price of 399$.
After the installation of Disk Drill, which is a straightforward task without any complex options, you are ready to go. When you fire up the tool, Disk Drill will identify all of your connected storage drives and partitions. Deleted partitions are shown as well, which is a nice etra: If you accidentally deleted a whole partition by mistake, you can intend to restore it with Disk Drill as well. Recovery starts with a click on the respective button. Using the arrow-symbol, you might choose which scan-option you want to use. For complicated cases there is a slower Deep Scan, which you might want to try if the Quick Scan does not succeed.
There are two additional options for each drive available on the main screen. The Protect button will allow you to activate a feature called Recovery Vault which might help you to recover lost files in the future more quickly. With that Recovery Vault turned on, Disk Drill saves automatically the metadata (filename, file location, etc) of deleted files, making it much easier to identify and recover these files later. When activating Recovery Vault, you can limit it to certain folders or exclude file-types you might not want to protect.
If you click the Extras button on the main screen you can also create a disk image of any existing partition to have a complete backup. Disk Image supports the file image formats .dmg, .img and .iso. Using those image-files you might also convert an existing partition into a virtual machine or copy them to an usb-drive.
The actual file-recovery feature is pretty straightforward. After analyzing the disk and clicking the Recover button, you will see a folder structure with all files and locations that can be recovered. To make things easier, Disk Drill offers a set of filters which are pretty useful, if you are just interested in a certain kind of files and don´t care about the rest – like videos.
Those filters can be adjusted to your specific needs, clicking on the wheel button in the upper right corner. There you can select or remove certain file types using their endings. Disk Drill supports more than 300 different file types it can recognize and recover just those.
Once you have selected which files you want to bring back to life, you can click the blue recovery button in the upper right cornerto start the actual recovery procedure. If you don´t aim to recover 1000s of files of big size, this won´t take very long on a modern PC. Disk Drill will place the restored files in the selected folder.
