Disk Drill for Mac, or how to recover deleted files and folders on macOS. How to recover deleted files on Mac for free How to use Disk Drill

Want to recover deleted files on Mac OS X, such as important business documents, music, photos or videos? Have files or entire partitions disappeared from your Mac? Having problems accessing a flash drive or memory card? We will help you by providing simple and reliable data recovery for Mac OS X.

Disk Drill will help you not only recover data. The program also contains useful hard drive tools that will help you clean up your Macintosh, find duplicate files, create backups, and monitor the health of your drive. By downloading Disk Drill, you will receive comprehensive protection for your entire disk.

Disk Drill allows you to scan and recover data from any device, including Macintosh hard drives, external hard drives, cameras, iPhones, iPads, iPods, Android devices, flash drives, Kindles, and memory cards. In many cases, Disk Drill will scan your device even if it is unstable, unreadable, or has damaged partitions. Using powerful algorithms, Disk Drill provides reliable data recovery for Mac.

Disk Drill knows the easiest way to recover data on Mac OS X. Just one click starts a powerful scanning process that will show you a list of files to be recovered. By previewing these files, you can easily determine which of them will be successfully recovered. If you use data protection features, some methods for recovering files on your Mac will be free. If not, just a small update will allow you to recover deleted files and continue working.

Has your hard drive or memory card suddenly stopped being detected or appears empty? This may be due to a damaged partition. Your data may still be on the media, but the "map" that the system needs to determine the location of the data may be lost. Disk Drill will repair damaged partitions and return your data if it is still there. All connected devices are supported. Depending on the type of file system, different data recovery algorithms are used. Even if the device has been formatted, the data can still be recovered.

This can happen to anyone, especially when it comes to mobile devices: You may accidentally delete photos, messages or documents. But don't worry, Disk Drill 3 will help you recover all your lost data on Android.

Accidentally clicked in the wrong place? We will help you get your deleted data back to your iPhone or iPad. Disk Drill can recover various file formats on your iOS device such as call history, contacts, messages and more.

Disk Drill for Windows is a free program for data recovery in the Windows operating system. The Disk Drill program recovers data from the hard drive, external storage media (external hard drive, flash drive, memory card, etc.). File systems supported: HFS/HFS+, FAT16/FAT32, NTFS, EXT3, EXT4 and others.

You can lose data from your computer due to accidental deletion, formatting, damage to the drive, loss of a partition, emptying the recycle bin, etc. It happens that very important information is lost, so there is a need to recover deleted files.

The task of data recovery is solved by special programs, with the help of which the user can try to recover lost files. Why try? Because it is not always possible to recover files if the files are damaged or completely overwritten. This must be taken into account.

Disk Drill PRO for Windows is a special free version of the program for the Windows operating system. The Disk Drill program is well known to Mac OS X users. There are two versions of the application available for the Mac OS X operating system: the free Disk Drill Basic and the paid Disk Drill PRO.

Disk Drill uses three recovery modes:

  • Undelete - undoes deletion of files from a disk or media protected using Recovery Vailt mode

The Disk Drill PRO program works on Windows 10, 8.1, 8, 7, Vista, XP operating systems. You can download Disk Drill from the official website of the manufacturer: the American company CleverFiles.

Disk Drill Interface

After launching, the Disk Drill program detects all the computer’s drives for a while: hard drives, external drives connected to the computer. Disk Drill has a very simple interface in English.

The main window of Disk Drill displays a list of disks of this computer: hard drive, external drives connected to the computer: flash drives, external hard drives, memory cards, etc. Opposite each disk there is a “Recover” button, then there is an arrow for entering the context menu, with additional recovery options.

To protect this disk, using the “Protect” button, the “Recovery Vailt” mode is used. Using the "Extras" button, you can create a disk image in DMG format in order to recover data from the image, and not directly from the computer disk.

Data recovery in Disk Drill

Before restoring, close all programs currently running on your computer. When restoring, save the data on another drive to increase the chances of a positive result. Remember that it is not always possible to recover files, because the files may be damaged or completely overwritten.

Recovering large files is particularly difficult due to disk fragmentation. Fragments of a large file are located in different places on the disk. After deleting a file, new data is written in place of the fragments. Therefore, data recovery programs often cannot recover the entire file. Monitor the condition of your computer and do it regularly.

Select a computer drive or external drive to recover files. A computer's hard drive can have multiple partitions. In order not to scan the entire hard drive, but to immediately select the desired partition, click on the triangle-shaped button located to the right of the disk name. Select the desired hard drive partition.

To start file recovery, click on the “Recover” button, in this case, all recovery methods will be used. If you need to choose the recovery mode yourself, click on the arrow located next to the “Recover” button. In the context menu that opens, select the desired action:

  • Run all recovery methods - run all recovery methods (default)
  • Undelete protected data - canceling file deletion using Recovery Vault mode
  • Quick Scan - quick scan
  • Deep Scan - deep scan

After selecting the method, the search for deleted data on the selected disk will begin. For scanning, I chose an external USB drive (flash drive). The scanning process status is displayed in the panel in the program window.

A list of detected files located in folders will appear in the Disk Drill program window. Scanning can be stopped using the “Pause” button, or canceled by clicking the “Cansel” button. Using the “Save Sessions” button, data about the scanning session is saved.

If the disk being scanned is large, the scanning process will take a long time.

After scanning is completed, in the program window you will see folders with found files. By default, a list of all found files is displayed. The results can be filtered by file type: pictures (Pictures), videos (Video), documents (Documents), audio (Audio), archives (Archives), by size (...by size), or by date (...by date).

Unfortunately, not all files can be recovered, or recovered completely. This must be taken into account when restoring information.

Click on the magnifying glass image to view the file. Files to be restored, such as images, will be visible in the viewer.

For example, this image can be restored without problems.


In Disk Drill you can restore an entire folder of files, or just individual files. In the Disk Drill window, mark individual files or folders for data recovery.

I selected the "Pictures" folder with images. By default, the program saves the recovered data to the “Documents” folder of the user profile. If necessary, you can change the directory to save the recovered files. To do this, click on the button in the form of a folder, which is located on the panel opposite “Recover to:”.

To start the process of restoring and saving data, click on the “Recover” button on the panel.

Once the recovery process is complete, enter your Documents folder (or another folder). The "Pictures" folder contains folders named after the image format, in this case "jpg". When you open the folder, you will see the recovered pictures.

Using Recovery Vault Mode

When using Recovery Vailt mode, all files on the disk are indexed and the location of all fragments is recorded. This mode significantly speeds up and increases the chances of successful data recovery.

To enter Recovery Vailt mode, click on the “Protect” button, which is located opposite the desired drive (hard drive, removable media, etc.).

After this, a window will open in which you can enable or disable the Recovery Vailt mode using the buttons: “ON” and “OFF”.

You will see two options in the window:

  • Choose folder to protect - select a folder to protect
  • Choose files to exclude from protection - select files to exclude from protection

Using the “Add folder” button you can add files for protection. By default, some folders are added for protection in Recovery Vailt mode. You can remove a folder from the protected list using the “Delete” button.

In a similar way, you can add files to exceptions that do not need to be protected from deletion. This option also adds some settings.

After clicking on the “Reset to defaults” button, you can reset the Recovery Vailt mode settings to default, in each option separately.

To go to the main window from Recovery Vailt mode, click on the “Back” button.

Conclusions of the article

Disk Drill PRO for Windows is a free file recovery program. Using Disk Drill, you can recover lost data from your computer and external drives connected to your computer: images, videos, audio, documents, archives, disk partitions, etc.

Or Arq, Mac users never face the problem of data loss, because they can restore a particular file at any time. But there is another category of users who believe that OS X is much more reliable than Windows, and they are insured against unexpected data loss. This is how it is in principle, but now the user himself is responsible for all deleted files, who could accidentally delete important information. And if such a case occurs, then the utility will be able to recover deleted data.

In contact with

Start

When you launch it for the first time, you will be asked to configure the program to suit your needs. The maximum result in data recovery is guaranteed when all Disk Drill modules are running until the moment of data loss. More detailed information about their purpose and functioning can be found by clicking on the icons with a question mark.

You will also be asked to study the manual. The main problem is that the local guide has not been translated into Russian at all, and when using the program you can notice flaws in the localization.

Interface

In the latest versions, the interface has been greatly redesigned and is significantly different from what you can see in outdated reviews and videos. The design has become more minimalistic, and when you launch an application, your eyes no longer run all over the window looking for the right button, and there were quite a few of them.

Search and recover data on Mac OS X

Now everything is simple - select the system drive (external drive, flash drive, SD card, etc.) and press the search button, after which a long scan takes place (120 GB SSD on a MacBook '13 was scanned in 15 minutes).

Supports all not only current, but also quite outdated file systems. HFS/HFS+, FAT16/FAT32, NTFS, EXT3, EXT4 and other formats are not dangerous for the program.

After the scan is completed, the utility will show all existing and reconstructed files. Recovered files will not be presented in the folders in which they were before deletion, but in categories depending on the type of files: images, documents, videos, and so on.

But the whole situation is saved by the built-in search with a filter:

  • keywords;
  • data type;
  • approximate size;
  • the period in which the file was deleted.

Works with all popular data formats, from simple video files (AVI, M4V, MKV, MOV) or Final Cut Pro files to contact databases (ABCDDB), disk images (XML, DMG) and others.

Select the files you are interested in and save to disk or mount as a disk in the system. It's simple! The scanning session will be saved and searching for files will be faster in the future.

We have given an example of deep scanning, but this is far from the only data search mode:

  • Quick Scan is the ideal tool for identifying recently deleted data. Scanning occurs in 10-20 seconds.

  • Deep scan - allows you to search not only individual partitions, but also scan the entire disk. The procedure is quite long and you can’t get away with it by brewing tea. The method is used if a quick scan does not produce results.
  • Universal partition search - allows you to find and restore a partition on a deleted disk.

  • Finding a lost HFS partition.

To increase the efficiency of data search and recovery, it would be a good idea to turn to the “ Types" And " List» in Disk Drill settings.

You can set up exceptions for search and display, so you can cut out the lion's share of unnecessary information.

Data protection

It’s great when you can recover accidentally deleted data, but it’s much better to take care of protecting information in advance. Information will be protected by two protection modes:

  • Recovery Vault- thanks to this mode, all attributes of deleted data will be stored in a special section of Disk Drill. It is possible to restore any deleted file, provided that no system data is written in its place (it is advisable to restore it immediately after losing information). The uniqueness of the mode lies in the fact that it is not a file backup and disk space will not be mercilessly consumed. The function is relevant for MacBooks with a small amount of memory on board.

  • Warranty restoration- classic mode, in which deleted files are backed up to a separate location. There are many attributes for more detailed configuration (exception masks, minimum file size, storage time and space size). Ideal for those who have a fairly impressive hard drive capacity.

Versions and cost

There are several versions of Disk Drill, distributed at different prices and with different functionality:

  • Drill Disk Basic (free)- there is no way to restore files. The demo version of the product allows you to test the functionality of the program to a limited extent.
  • Disk Drill Pro ($89/$44.5)- full-featured version of the program. It costs $89, but for residents of the post-Soviet space there is a 50% discount. Both amounts are exorbitant, but when it comes to missing files (and some of them can be priceless), you will pay the money without hesitation.
  • Drill Disk Enterprise ($399)- corporate version for an unlimited number of users and computers. Ideal for startups and large campaigns.
  • Disk Drill Media Recovery ($39.99)- limited version distributed through the Mac App Store. Due to Apple's strict policies, the program cannot gain full access to hard drive partitions and, as a result, the Recovery Vault system does not work. Files and folders are restored without problems.

conclusions

Disk Drill is one of the best data recovery utilities that allows you to recover a huge amount of information and protect existing data from most emergency situations. The only disadvantage is the price, but this parameter is subjective. It all depends on how valuable the files are at stake.

P.S.: Removing Disk Drill must be done directly from the program window ( Settings → Are common → Remove Disk Drill).


Disk Drill is a modern tool for recovering lost information from storage media. The media can be anything: hard drive, flash drive, SSD, or even hidden partitions of an external HDD. The program is already well known to MAC OS users, but has recently been released for Windows.

The application is designed to recover deleted data, emptied even from the Recycle Bin, formatted, broken, etc. files. In fact, everything that was lost can be brought back to life, at least try. Since Disk Drill is quite a powerful tool, there is a high probability that you will still be able to see the recovered data.

What affects information recovery?

This question is very important; it affects the use of the program, since there are simpler situations and, conversely, those in which nothing can be done. To understand the level of complexity of the situation, you need to know a little theory.

The disk consists of cells for recording data and as they are filled and used, it retrieves or enters information into this storage in the form of machine code (ones and zeros).

When you decide to delete data, it is not actually erased, it is simply given a status that it is suitable for overwriting.

Bytes of information with this mark are not displayed by Windows, but still exist. To extract such data, information recovery programs are used, including Disk Drill.

This leads to the conclusion that it is impossible to restore files if they have already been overwritten. This process is quite lengthy, but the more actively the HDD is used and the older recording you want to restore, the less chance there is. Therefore, if you accidentally deleted files, it is better to use the drive as little as possible until the information is restored.

Difficulties also arise when restoring large files larger than 1GB. The fact is that information is recorded in fragments in different cells, and the more fragmented the bytes of information are, which are scattered in different corners, the more difficult it is to restore them. Therefore, defragment the disk more often, this will have a positive effect on the speed of the HDD and will make it more likely to recover data.

The most difficult thing is with video files, they require absolute integrity, and if you come to your senses after a while, then there may be incomplete data. On the contrary, most likely you will be able to recover the most important files in docx, txt, mp3, dll and other formats; these are where the main value lies.

How to recover information using Disk Drill?

The program comes in several modes: a more functional, Pro version - paid and standard, which is enough for ordinary tasks - absolutely free.

Key benefits of Disk Drill:

  • Free, functional mode that allows you to recover files up to 500MB;
  • Supports common formats FAT16/32, NTFS, HFS/+, EXT3/4, etc.;
  • Intuitive interface;

  • Content protection function;
  • Several scan types.

To use all the benefits of the program you need:

  • Download from the website https://www.cleverfiles.ru/downloads.html;
  • After a short installation, launch the application;
  • You will see several disk partitions in the main program window. Near each logical drive there is a “Recover” button and next to it there is a down arrow, in which you can select the scan type. If you click “Recover”, all options will be used, click on the button;
  • The process of searching for deleted information will begin. For large HDDs, this may take a long time. The results will be structured according to the folders in which they were located. There is also a separate filter in the utility, located on the right, to search for certain types of information;

  • The shared folder “Founds files”, when you open it you will see the folders that exist on the disk. This does not mean that the folder itself is deleted, just that the structure is respected. Expand all the necessary folders until you find the important file;

  • Check the box next to the information you are interested in (you can specify multiple);
  • Then, at the top of the program, click on the “Recover” button.

When selecting target files, pay attention to their size; in some cases, an extremely low volume for a given type is clearly visible, for example: a video file that weighs 4Kb.

If you encounter this, then there is no point in restoring it, since it will not work. This is due to a long-standing deletion and overwriting.

Recovery Vail function

Designed for some protection of data on the disk. You can specify protection for files or folders with important information and Disk Drill will make a copy of the information with it. Thanks to indexing and recording the storage of information segments, you get a higher speed of the program and a higher chance of restoring information in its entirety.

Click on the “Protect” button next to the disk partition, then a window will open with the option to turn protection on/off. Using the “Choose folder to protect” button, you can specify the path to the folder that will be protected. The text field below will display the paths to all protected files/folders on the system, some are installed by default.

There are also other similar programs, in case this did not help you, for example, you can use the File Scavenger utility.

Disk Drill allows you to return valuable files lost as a result of erroneous actions or failures, which significantly saves the user’s time and nerve cells. Also, thanks to the protection, you will be able to restore target files in a short time.

If you still have questions on the topic “Recovering information from media using Disk Drill,” you can ask them in the comments


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How often do you regret lost information? If not often, then you're lucky. If you are as careless with electronic information as I am, then you should find a solution to avoid such problems or, if you cannot avoid it, find a universal solution. I can already feel how casually the readers who use Time Machine backups reach for the cross on the tab. Yes, friends, I understand you perfectly. For a long time, I also had no problems with information, and if something suddenly disappeared, then my short communication with the time machine returned all the information I needed to its place. But about a month ago I had a problem: one of my two external hard drives fell asleep forever, and along with it a huge collection of films went into oblivion. I have since turned off my time machine and use the hard drive that once held a backup copy of my Macintosh HD as additional space. Now I'm much more careful and whenever Clean My Mac prompts me to empty the trash, I double-check its contents for any accidentally deleted files. However, no one is immune from mistakes, and if you are faced with similar problems, I have news for you.

This news is, of course, good. I don’t know if you’ve heard that Cleverfiles announced the release of a Russian-language version of the Disk Drill program, but it happened. Does this name mean anything to you? Well, let's tell you in more detail. Disk Drill is a program quite widely known and used abroad. Recently, all Russian-speaking users have been able to work with the program bypassing the language barrier. What is Disk Drill for?

For prevention. Like protection from fools. No one is immune from mistakes, and getting rid of, say, a term paper on “Machine Parts” will not be difficult: the trash bin is emptied in just a couple of seconds. If this suddenly happens, then there is no need to panic. Of course, if you have previously installed the free version of Disk Drill. If not yet, then I advise you not to tease fate.

Immediately after you have installed Disk Drill on your Mac, launch the program and go to the “Data Protection” tab. Here you should enable Recovery Vault mode on all your media and you can safely forget about the problems. The application will notify you about the successful indexing of information on the media with a Growl pop-up notification. Now the program closely monitors your actions in the system and saves service records about each deleted file in the program storage. As soon as you need to recover any file, you will need to upgrade Disk Drill to the Pro version. The program will take literally a few minutes to restore the lost file.


The free version of Disk Drill allows you to scan all media connected to your computer, and a preview will help you make sure that the files you and I need are available for recovery. If, nevertheless, you inadvertently deleted one or more files and folders that could not be deleted, go to Disk Drill in the “Recovery” tab. The program offers three recovery modes:

Undelete - mode for undoing the deletion of files previously protected using Recovery Vault;

Quick Scan - quickly search for deleted files;

Deep Scan - or deep scanning, used if Quick Scan did not bring the desired result.


It is necessary to restore lost information in this order. The only note: if you did not initially enable the Recovery Vault mode, you should immediately go to the second item - Quick Scan. If a quick search does not produce results, activate the in-depth scanning mode.

Disk Drill Pro or the paid version of the program, in addition to the standard Recovery Vault, offers another way to save information. Activate the “Guaranteed Recovery” mode and then you will not need to worry about the safety of your information. Guaranteed recovery is a kind of backup of all deleted information. Of course, this mode requires more free space, unlike Recovery Vault, but at the same time it guarantees the recovery of copies of all the files you need.


As for supported file formats, the list is quite extensive. The program works with graphics, videos, settings files, text files and many others. Developers are actively working to increase the number of formats available for restoration. The program settings provide a complete list of supported formats, but if you have problems recovering a file that is not in the format catalog provided, you can contact the developers and help them improve their product.

Of course, you have a question about what file systems Disk Drill works with. Here the list is also quite extensive and includes all currently existing file systems - HFS/HFS+, FAT16/FAT32, NTFS, EXT3, EXT4 and others. A distinctive feature of the application is the ability to recover files even on formatted media.

The application also has a small function for monitoring the status of disks. The SMART utility icon appears in the bar menu, which displays the current temperature of the main disk of the system. This utility will tell you how worn out the main storage media of your Mac is.

Of course, the program works not only with HDDs or media. Disk Drill can also restore and save information on various memory cards (regardless of whether they are connected to the corresponding connector on the Mac or located in the camera connected to the computer) and USB drives. This also includes various portable players, including iPod.

By the way, if not only you, but also third parties have access to your Mac, you can, if necessary, lock the program, thereby limiting access to it. You can set a password in the corresponding settings window. Interestingly, you can recover a forgotten password using email, having first specified the address in the corresponding settings line.


If, when you launch the program again, you realize that you have forgotten the password you set, click on the recovery button and a message with the password will be sent to your email.


Cool. A simple and effective solution that does not require the user to remember additional recovery passwords.

The overall impression of the program is quite good. True, at first it was a little difficult to figure out what was what. Nevertheless, ten minutes of communication with Disk Drill was enough for me to understand its functionality. By the way, the application is far from completely translated into Russian. In some places, windows or individual points in English slipped through. The introductory course for learning how to use the application has not been translated into Russian at all. And these are nine windows with text and graphics. A user unfamiliar with the English language will be able to navigate only by images. I hope that in the near future the developers will solve this problem and completely adapt the program for the Russian-speaking user.

The basic version of Disk Drill is distributed free of charge, and you can purchase the Pro version with a 50% discount in honor of the application's release to the CIS market.

Name:
Publisher/Developer: CleverFiles
Price: Free; $44.50
Link: ,



 

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