After around 4 minutes, some deleted files were already identified and shown in the list of recoverable files: To begin the process, I clicked on the Recover button (highlighted in red in the above screenshot). Now is the time for the moment of truth – testing Disk Drill data recovery capabilities! To do this, I connected a 2GB memory card taken from my daily phone to a USB 2.0 card reader and use it with Disk Drill to see what kinds of deleted files can be recovered. These can be changed in Preferences > Disk List. This is the dashboard of Disk Drill, showing the disk drives on the system and their associated partitions:īy default, read-only media and empty drives are hidden. In my tests, launching in portable mode will still allow most data recovery operations, except for recovery vault and SMART monitoring, which is only possible once Disk Drill is installed to the local drive:Īs can be seen, while not designed to be a disk monitoring tool, the SMART menu of Disk Drill provides useful information regarding your hard drive health. The rest of this article will be based on the Mac version of Disk Drill, activated using the Pro license key obtained from CleverFiles.Īfter successful installation and activation, you will be presented with the following screen, allowing you to configure some initial settings, show the introduction wizard, or launch Disk Drill in portable mode: If you are on Windows, you can download Disk Drill for free here. While the exact type of exported data is not specified by CleverFiles and the sample data is not very helpful, my guess is that part of it is derived on the filesystem journal, available for NTFS/HFS as well as for ext3/ext4, which contains, in part, the list of filesystem activities and when they were performed on the drive. The only distinguishing feature of the Enterprise version is the ability to export forensics disk data into CSV/SQLite for further analysis. In order to perform actual recovery, users will need to purchase the Pro version ($89), which can be installed on up to three different machines, or the Enterprise version ($399) that can be installed on an unlimited number of machines. The Basic version, while free, only offers basic features such as recovery vault (more on that later), disk backup into DMG images and ability to preview which deleted files can be recovered from the drive. Three types of licenses are available for the Mac version of Disk Drill: Basic, Pro and Enterprise. To make the process more user friendly, I hope that Disk Drill could release a bootable CD image that users can use to boot up directly into recovery mode without having to worry about affecting existing drives. However, if the deleted files are on the internal hard drive, it is best to create an image of the active disk partition, mount it in Disk Drill and attempt data recovery on this image instead, to minimize any further risks of data loss. The above can be easily achieved if your deleted files are on a portable drive, for example, a thumb drive – just stop using that drive except for the purpose of data recovery. As a result, any further disk activities on the affected drive may overwrite the actual data of the deleted files and remove any hope of a successful recovery. Most data recovery tools assume that only the file system entries for the affected files have been removed and will scan the file system for the sectors containing the actual data which hopefully have not been overwritten. In this post, I will describe my experience using Disk Drill, a relatively new data recovery software made by CleverFiles supporting Mac OS 10.5 and above, to recover deleted files on my USB thumb drive, and share some interesting findings.Īs with most data recovery tasks, to stand the highest chance of success, do not perform any further file/folder operations on the affected drive. If you are unfortunate enough to find yourself in this scenario, the good news is that all is not lost as you can still try several recovery solutions to get your data back, whether you are using Windows, Mac or even Linux. Accidentally deleting an important file from your hard disk only to realize that you have no other backup copies available is usually a frustrating experience even for the most experienced computer users.
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