Disk Drill for Windows is a free data recovery program for the Windows operating system. Disk Drill restores data from a hard drive, external storage media (external hard drive, flash drive, memory card, etc.). Supported file systems: HFS / HFS +, FAT16 / FAT32, NTFS, EXT3, EXT4 and others.
You can lose data from a computer due to accidental deletion, formatting, damage to the drive, losing a partition, cleaning the recycle bin, etc. It happens that very important information is lost, so there is a need to recover deleted files.
Content:
- Disk Drill Interface
- Data Recovery in Disk Drill
- Using Recovery Vault
- Conclusions of the article
The task of data recovery is solved by special programs with which the user can make an attempt to recover lost files. Why try? Because it is not always possible to restore files if the files are damaged or completely overwritten. This must be taken into account.
Disk Drill PRO for Windows is a special free version of the program for the Windows operating system. Disk Drill is well known to Mac OS X users. Two versions of the application are available for Mac OS X: the free Disk Drill Basic and the paid Disk Drill PRO.
Disk Drill uses three recovery modes:
- Undelete - cancel deletion of files from a disk or media protected by Recovery Vailt mode.
- Quick Scan - quick scan.
- Deep Scan - deep scan.
Disk Drill PRO runs on Windows 10, 8.1, 8, 7, Vista, XP. You can download Disk Drill from the official website of the manufacturer: the American company CleverFiles.
Next, install the Disk Drill application on your computer, and then run the program.
Disk Drill Interface
After starting, Disk Drill for a while detects all the disks of the computer: hard drives, external drives connected to the computer. Disk Drill has a very simple English interface.
The main window of Disk Drill displays the list of disks of this computer: hard disk, external drives connected to the computer: flash drives, external hard drives, memory cards, etc. The Recover button is located opposite each disk, then the arrow for Enter the context menu, with additional recovery options.
To protect this drive, using the "Protect" button, use the "Recovery Vailt" mode. Using the Extras button (Advanced), you can create a disk image in DMG format in order to recover data from the image, and not directly from the computer disk.
Data Recovery in Disk Drill
Before recovery, close all programs that are currently running on the computer. When restoring, save data to another disk to increase the chances of a positive result. Remember that recovering files is not always obtained, because the files may be damaged, or completely overwritten.
Of particular difficulty is recovering large files due to disk fragmentation. Fragments of a large file are located in different places on the disk. After deleting the file, new data is written to the fragment location. Therefore, data recovery programs often cannot recover the entire file. Monitor the status of the computer, regularly perform defragmentation .
Select a computer drive, or an external drive to recover files. A computer hard drive can have several partitions. In order not to scan the entire hard drive, but to immediately select the desired partition, click on the button in the form of a triangle located to the right of the name of the drive. Select the desired hard disk partition.
To start file recovery, click on the “Recover” button, in this case, all recovery methods will be used. If you need to choose the recovery mode yourself, click on the arrow located near the “Recover” button. In the context menu that opens, select the desired action:
- Run all recovery methods - run all recovery methods (default).
- Undelete protected data - cancel deletion of files using Recovery Vault mode.
- Quick Scan - quick scan.
- Deep Scan - deep scan.
After choosing a method, the search for deleted data on the selected drive will begin. For scanning, I chose an external USB drive (USB flash drive). The status of the scanning process is displayed on the panel in the program window.
A list of detected files that are located in folders appears in the Disk Drill program window. Scanning can be stopped using the “Pause” button, or canceled by clicking on the “Cansel” button. Using the “Save Sessions” button, data about the scanning session is saved.
If the scanned disk is large, then the scanning process will take a long time.
After the scan is completed, in the program window you will see folders with the found files. By default, a list of all found files (All files) is displayed. The results can be filtered by file type: pictures (Pictures), video (Video), documents (Documents), audio (Audio), archives (Archives), by size (... by size), or by date (... by date).
Next, open the folder to view the detected files. Detected files in Disk Drill may be under different names; the file size and format are displayed.
Unfortunately, not all files can be restored, or restored completely. This must be considered when restoring information.
Click on the magnifying glass to view the file. Files to be restored, for example, images, you will see in the viewer.
For example, this image can be restored without problems.
In Disk Drill, you can restore the entire folder with files, or only individual files. In the Disk Drill window, select individual files or folders for data recovery.
I selected the “Pictures” folder with the images. By default, the program saves the recovered data to the “Documets” (Documents) folder of the user profile. If necessary, you can change the directory to save the recovered files. To do this, click on the button in the form of a folder, which is located on the panel, opposite "Recover to:".
To start the recovery process and save data, click on the "Recover" button on the panel.
After the recovery process is completed, go to the “Documents” folder (or to another folder). The Pictures folder contains folders named after the image format name, in this case “jpg”. Opening the folder, you will see the restored pictures.
Using Recovery Vault
When using Recovery Vailt mode, all files on the disk are indexed, the location of all fragments is recorded. This mode significantly speeds up and increases the chances of successful data recovery.
To enter Recovery Vailt mode, click on the “Protect” button, which is located opposite the desired drive (hard disk, removable media, etc.).
After that, a window will open in which you can enable or disable Recovery Vailt mode using the buttons: “ON” and “OFF”.
In the window you will see two options:
- Choose folder to protect - select the folder to protect.
- Choose files to exclude from protection - select files to exclude from protection.
Using the “Add folder” button, you can add files for protection. By default, some folders are added for protection in Recovery Vailt mode. You can delete a folder from the protected list using the “Delete” button.
In a similar way, you can add files to the exceptions that do not need to be protected from deletion. This option also added some settings.
After clicking on the “Reset to defaults” button, you can reset the Recovery Vailt mode to default settings, in each option individually.
To go to the main window from Recovery Vailt mode, click on the "Back" button.
Conclusions of the article
Disk Drill PRO for Windows is a free file recovery program. Using Disk Drill, you can recover lost data from your computer and external drives connected to your computer: images, video, audio, documents, archives, disk partitions, etc.