Review: Easily Recover Deleted or Damaged Files From Your Mac with Disk Drill Pro

Posted on May 20, 2012 by

Being a computer technician, I see a lot of people bring Macs and PCs in needing files recovered that were accidentally deleted, or even more often, from a failing or corrupted hard drive. I’m a strong proponent of having constant backups using services like SugarSync, Backblaze and of course, Apple’s Time Machine.

But many people learn their lesson the hard way, and fortunately there’s great Mac hard drive recovery software available like Disk Drill Pro.

Disk Drill Pro can recover deleted or damaged files from hard drives, memory cards, USB drives and iPods. It runs on Mac OS X, but can also recover data from Windows NTFS drives and many other file systems.

I decided to test Disk Drill Pro with hard drives from two different clients. The first one was from a MacBook that wouldn’t boot into OS X, it just stayed at the boot screen forever. I removed the drive and connected it to my Mac. The drive would mount, but the Finder window would freeze whenever I tried to browse it. I ran a deep scan in Disk Drill Pro and was able to recover all of the user’s files. Apple’s Disk Utility said there were issues with the drive even after formatting it, so I installed a new drive in the MacBook and my client is very happy to have a working computer again with all his files.

The second drive I tested was from a Windows 7 computer. The drive was NTFS format, and my client had deleted hundreds of pictures that she thought were also on an external drive. It turns out the pictures she deleted were not on the other drive, and of course she started to panic. She had already emptied the Recycle Bin, so I connected it to my Mac and ran a deep scan using Disk Drill Pro. I was amazed at how quickly it was able to find the pictures, and my client couldn’t have been happier.

Although in my testing I recovered files from externally connected drives, Disk Drill Pro can also recover from your internal Mac hard drive. It also has some great disk monitoring features so you will always know that your hard drive is running correctly, and be able to fix problems before they get worse and cause more problems.

Another cool feature in Disk Drill Pro is Recovery Vault. This lets you recover important properties of your files like the original filename, location and more. Without Recovery Vault, information like this is impossible to recover on Apple’s HFS and HFS+ file systems.

If you are looking for some software to recover lost files, I can highly recommend Disk Drill Pro. I also suggest having it on your Mac to help prevent future hard drive issues and have the ability to deal with it quickly if a problem does occur.

Check out Disk Drill Pro on their website at cleverfiles.com. You can save 25% on your purchase with the following coupon code: MDNWZ-DD25U4