Then I deleted it and emptied the Recycle Bin, and ran a quick scan again. A simple real-life test of Deep Drill’s data recovery capabilities This will bring back a lot:ĭisk Drill also has search for lost partitions and undelete protected data features, but I haven’t yet tested these at this time. Used if you don’t think you’ve deleted the file(s) you’re trying to find, but you can’t find them in Windows Explorer. The name “deep scan” would therefore seem appropriate. For example, on my laptop which I brought brand new in 2020, it was finding random images apparently dated back to 2016: As with the quick scan, you may be surprised what it brings back. You can see that after running for just a little while (see the bottom-left), vastly more files were found than in the entire quick scan. Here’s what the deep scan looked like on my machine after running it for a while: You can try the quick scan first, and if it doesn’t find whatever files you’re looking for, only then run a deep scan. On my fairly new laptop with just a few GB of storage used, Disk Drill completed a quick scan on my main hard drive in just a couple of minutes:ĭisk Drill will then likely bring back a bunch of different files, many of which you’ve probably never looked at:ĭeep scan in Disk Drill is vastly more comprehensive than the quick scan above, and may take you over 100 times longer.

What follows is a simple demonstration on how to use the quick scan, deep scan and allocate existing data features of Disk Drill. I was able to install it within a couple of minutes:Īnd here’s roughly what it’ll look like when you open it for the first time: At the time of writing, the current version of Disk Drill is about 34MB, so perfectly reasonable.

I strongly recommend only downloading Disk Drill from (the company behind it) and no third-party source. There should be a big green button to download it for free: To install Disk Drill, go to and click either the “Data recovery for Mac” or “Data recovery for Windows” header links. ( Click here to jump straight to the verdict on how good I think Disk Drill is) Installing Disk Drill Here I’ll test out the software on my own machine, answer some FAQ’s, and write up a short review with my recommendation on whether it’s worth trying or not. If you’ve accidentally deleted or lost important files, it can potentially recover them for you.

Disk Drill is a data recovery tool for Mac and Windows.

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