Disk Drill Review: Recovering Deleted Windows Files

Cleverfiles reached out to me asking if I had time to do a review of their Disk Drill software which is for both Windows and Mac.  Disk Drill is a simple, easy to use file recovery software that helps you recover items you may have deleted weeks or months ago but wish to see if there is a way to recover them.  I delete video and image content all the time, as I create so much content, and once in a while I want to grab a video that I forgot I deleted, so I decided to see how much content I could find and recover with Disk Drill.

It also works well for USB or flash drives, not just for recovering files on your primary HDD or SSD drive.

The version I reviewed was 1.0.0.188 PRO for Windows.

When you first run the program you have a list of all your drives that it detects that you can start recovery on, or continue where you left off.  You also have option to snapshot an image of your disk too.

After you click the Recover button it will start scanning your drive looking for files that it can recover, it will also sort them into categories based on file type like Pictures, Video, Documents, Audio…etc.

You can see various MP4 files here in my video section of Disk DrillI random selected a whole bunch of files and recovered them 1 at a time, as well as recovered a group of files.

Obviously when you purge files the is no way to know what the original file names were, and the dates can be somewhat inaccurate on the file modify date/time stamps, but I generally was able to recover a bunch of recordings that worked fine.

When I searched the audio section I found a lot of mp3 files that I had purged around Christmas time when I found I had so many duplicates in my mp3 collection, so these were all there and recoverable as well.

Bottom line, I found Disk Drill to be very simple, it scans, it finds and shows you want you can recover.  Provided your data hasn’t been overwritten most simple delete and empty recycle bin files can be recovered in a short enough time provided the disk hasn’t written over that data section yet.  I was hoping a program like Disk Drill would have had other features, like being able to list all active files on a disk showing sizes, to help you recover drive space, or even the ability to purge/overwrite and secure your drive, but it is very single purpose in nature other than offering the backup option.

Though you do have the option called Protect which is the Disk Drill Recovery Vault (read more here) this allows Disk Drill to run a background service to store META information whenever you make changes to the drive, this helps ensure recovery better.  Note, Disk Drill is free and doesn’t cost anything to use the software so feel free to give it a try.