You know the drill to keep your files safe: backup, backup and backup. But we all know that accidents can happen and even your backup hard disk can crash. Disk Drill is a disk protection and recovery tool that aims to protect your Mac from losing data in the event that it crashed. Disk Drill supports HFS/HFS+, FAT, NTFS and other file systems and it can protect both internal and external drive. That means, if you plug in your USB drive, you can also use Disk Drill to protect it or recover data from it.
Most data recovery software is only useful when your hard disk crashes. Disk Drill is slightly different because it also comes with disk protection feature (recovery vault) to prevent data losses on HFS/HFS+ and FAT disks/partitions.
Download and installation
Download Disk Drill here. The current version is still in beta testing and is available for free download.
Once installed, it will prompt you to install driver for Disk Drill.
Once it is done, you will have a choice to view the tutorial slides or go direct to the main screen.
Usage
The main screen is easy to navigate. There are only two options: Protect and Recover.
Disk Drill Disk Protection
When you click on the “Prevent data loss”, you can see all the available drives that you can protect.
If you plug in a new USB drive (or external drive), it will show up in the list as well.
Select the drive (or partition) that you want to protect and at the bottom, click the shield icon to protect it.
What this protection feature does is to continuously monitor the device for data change. When something’s deleted, the recovery vault remembers all the original properties of the deleted items and makes it possible to easily recover this data later on.
More configuration options are available to specifically select/exclude the folders that you want to protect. Click on the Advanced button to reveal the configuration options.
Disk Drill Recovery
Likewise, the Recovery feature is also easy to use. Pick the disk that you want to recover data from, perform a scan scan and recover the required data.
Like any other data recovery software, there is no guarantee that your data can be recovered. It all depends on how recent it was deleted and whether it has been overwritten. In general, if you can preview the file, the chance of restoring it is high.
Once the scan is finished, you can either click on the Preview button to view the file or the Recover button to restore the file. If you choose the Recover option, it will prompt you to choose a Save destination. Remember, do not choose the same destination in the disk, it will overwrite the data.
Conclusion
Being a free and easy to use data protection and recovery software, Disk Drill is definitely worth you checking out. It is currently in beta testing. There is no info on the pricing yet, but CleverFiles will supply free lifetime licenses to every users who actively provide feedback and bugs during the beta testing period.
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Damien Oh
Damien Oh started writing tech articles since 2007 and has over 10 years of experience in the tech industry. He is proficient in Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and iOS, and worked as a part time WordPress Developer. He is currently the owner and Editor-in-Chief of Make Tech Easier.
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