Disk Drill

When you delete one or more files, the actual data is not removed from your disk. This makes it possible to recover deleted data, with the aid of specialized applications. One such application is Disk Drill. Besides salvaging erased data, the application is also capable of protecting your data from being lost forever. It comes in free and paid versions and you can have it up and running on your Mac in no time.

It should take only a minute to learn the layout of the interface and the application's controls. Disks and partitions are presented in a system of collapsible menus, on the main window, along with options for performing quick or in-depth scans, recovering data and more. Once a scanning process is complete, the found data will be displayed in a list, in their original folders structure. You can use various controls to filter the files or to locate specific items. When you find what you are looking for, you can either recover the data to a folder of your choice or mount it as a disk.

The recovery of deleted files is never guaranteed to work, especially if you don't perform the operation immediately after deleting the data. The good news is that Disk Drill comes with special protection features, which are aimed specifically at this issue. Its Recovery Vault consists of a unique algorithm, which increases your changes to find deleted files, as long as you don't overwrite the free space on your disk. Alternatively, you can use the Guaranteed Recovery protection, which keeps invisible copies of your files. You may need to sacrifice more disk space for this feature, but as its name suggests, the recovery of deleted files is guaranteed.

Both protection features can be configured to safeguard specific folders and to exclude files with user-defined extensions. Also, the Guaranteed protection can be set to keep the invisible copies for a certain amount of time and to avoid copying large files.