DISK DRILL PRO

System tool

Windows 10 or 11, or macOS | US$89 Free trial: N/A www.stardock.com/products/fences

When you accidentally delete an important file from your computer – or it mysteriously disappears – a datarecovery program can prove a life-saver. Disk Drill is one of the most respected options, but the steep cost of its Pro version may make you wonder what price you put on your data.

Although there’s no free trial, Disk Drill’s Basic edition lets you recover up to 500MB of data for free, which may be enough, depending on what you’ve lost. Simply select a drive – this can be a removable device such as a USB stick – and click the ‘Search for lost data’ button ( 1 in our screenshot). You can run a Deep Scan 2 if your initial search is unsuccessful, though this takes a lot longer.

Disk Drill does a great job of finding deleted files, locating more than 13,000 on our SSD – though most of these were duplicates. We like the way it organises its scan results by file type, file size and date modified, and lets you filter them by ‘recovery chance’. This is particularly useful in the free version, so you don’t waste your data limit on items that are unlikely to be restored. However, you should still be able to preview them, so you can decide whether it’s worth paying to try and retrieve valuable data.

Apart from unlimited data recovery, and the ability to install the software on three devices, Disk Drill Pro doesn’t offer many advantages over the Basic edition. Features such as data protection, drive backup and SMART monitoring are available in both, though buying a licence unlocks ‘advanced recovery algorithms’.

"Apart from unlimited data recovery, and the ability to install the software on three devices, Disk Drill Pro doesn’t offer many advantages over the Basic edition."