Benefits
- Elegant user interface
- Very complete recovery
- The free option may be enough for many
Our verdict
Disk Drill is a great option for recovering a lost email or message, but the price of the Pro version may make it a difficult task for casual use.
We’ve reviewed Disk Drill for Mac, a solution for when your Mac’s hard drive fails and you need to recover data, but what if the same thing happens to your iPhone? Here we’re looking at the version of the same software for anyone looking to recover data from their iPhone.
When it comes to the best data recovery apps for your iPhone, one thing is essential above all: simplicity.
After all, if you’re looking for lost data, the last thing you want is to have to dig through complex menus and jargon, especially if time is of the essence. Luckily, Disk Drill makes accessing your data a priority, meaning you can sift through your images, videos, or just about anything else within minutes of installation.
If you’re recovering less than 500MB of data, the free plan might work fine, but things get significantly more expensive for the Pro version. It’ll set you back $89/£70.56, with an additional option to add future updates for around $15/£15 as well, while pro users can buy a bundle of user licenses.
As we’ll see shortly, in our testing Disk Drill did an excellent job exploring deleted data from our test iPhone, but it actually offers additional features beyond data recovery.
Disk Drill can identify duplicate files, pinpoint where your drive may be storing data, and can save copies of files to prevent them from being accidentally deleted in the future.
First impressions
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While Dr. Fone and other apps are full of colorful icons, I was impressed by how similar Disk Drill looks to a standard Apple app on macOS. Note: This is a Mac app that lets you discover lost files on your iPhone (and elsewhere), it’s not an iPhone app.
The sidebar contains all the potential disk locations you can recover from, including local, NAS, RAID, and other devices. It even takes into account Time Machine data, allowing you to quickly explore your backups.
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As I mentioned earlier, this makes it much quicker to start digging into data than some other apps that bombard you with options right off the bat.
Features of the disc drill
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That’s not to say that Disk Drill doesn’t add a lot of features. In my testing, it was able to extract data that I thought was long lost from my iPhone. I will admit, though, that it took a while to scan the data, about an hour before I was able to scan it.
I was impressed by the number of old Whatsapp messages it could recover, as well as old contact information and more.
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Aside from recovery, Disk Drill offers a host of other tools. Its duplicate finder works on local storage as well as cloud-based options like Dropbox or Google Drive, while Data Protection stores a copy of a deleted file in case you need to refer to it. On the other end of the spectrum, it can also shred files so that they are unrecoverable.
Along with this, it can even create a backup macOS boot drive or disk image of your entire hard drive, ideal for older Macs with mechanical drives that are prone to failure.
The Disadvantages of Disk Drill
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Aside from the relatively high price and the time it takes to scan a phone, my only real complaint about Disk Drill was that it sometimes got a little irritated when my phone locked up. A few times, it ended up stopping the scan dead in its tracks, forcing me to start over. In most other cases, however, it didn’t cause any issues, so it may just be a bug.
The essential
It might be a bit pricey for occasional users, but as a safety net for anyone looking to regularly recover data from devices, or for enterprise users, Disk Drill is likely to be a very easy recommendation.
We also have a roundup of the best Mac recovery apps.
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