Disk Drill Revisited - Recovering 87K Files from a Drive That Finder Could Not Read

I first wrote about Disk Drill several months ago. The review is below. I recently had a chance to put the paid version of the data recovery tools to work in a real-world situation. I was presented with a 2TB NTFS formatted drive that would mount on my Mac, but displayed the message "Drive not available" and showed no files structure in the Finder. The drive belonged to a relative who lost access to her cloud account when switching jobs and ended up with only one copy of her files from a 20-year career - on a bad drive.

Disk Drill scanned the drive, and it was able to see files on it. It wanted me to make a byte for byte copy, but I didn't have another 2TB drive on hand. I had two 1TB hard drives and a dual drive bay, though. I used the Mac disk utility to combine the two physical drives into one logical drive and tried to initiate the copy again, but still got a message that the drive was too small. Since I knew that there was less than 100 GB of actual data on the drive, I was able to adjust the size of the number of bytes to be copied and the backup started. Although data seemed to be moving quickly, the progress indicator said the backup would take 28 hours. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Rather than doing a byte for byte copy, which also includes unused space, I elected to Disk Drill's recovery option instead. I initiated it and began to copy files, sometimes quickly and at other times seeming to stop. I got messages about the disk having physical damage, but the program never quit. After about 90 minutes, I had 86K files recovered.

I did not have to pay the full retail price to use the recovery tools because the app is available as part of Setapp, a $10 a month subscription that gives you unlimited access to hundreds of software titles.

Original Review 

Disk Drill 5 by Cleverfiles is marketed as data recovery software to retrieve lost files from internal and external drive media as well as iPhone, iPad and Android storage. Its website goes into considerable detail on its ease of use, its power and its ability to recover files. The free product allows you to preview what data is recoverable, but it takes the $89 paid product to actually recover your data using its full suite of tools. There are some free recovery options too, but they require you to implement some (included) tools before use.   

Free Tools

Even if you aren't in need of data recovery, however, Disk Drill is a worthy download because of the bundle of free tools it includes:

Disk Health
Free S.M.A.R.T. Disk Monitoring Stays Alert for Any Potential Disk Issues. It works on both internal and external drives.

Mac Cleanup
Analyze Disk Space, Locate Unused Files and Space Hogs, Free Up Your Storage Effortlessly.

Duplicate Finder
Easily Find and Remove Duplicate File Locations on Your Drive.

Recovery Drive
Create Your own Bootable USB Drive for Free Mac OS X Data Recovery.

Data Protection
Protect Your Data with Recovery Vault or Guaranteed Recovery. Recover it for Free.

Data Backup
Create Byte-to-byte Disk & Partition Backups for Future Mac OS X Recovery. In my testing of this feature on the internal hard drive of an M3 iMac, Disk Drill said "This drive is encrypted with the Apple M1/2 Security Chip. You can still back it up into a byte-to-byte disk image, but it probably won't be recoverable." This leads me to believe that a product like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! is better suited for the task. Disk Drill did fine, however, making a copy of a 500GB external disk.

You can download all of these tools for free from Cleverfiles.