Disk Drill vs Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery Comparison

These days every picture you take or every document you create ends up stored on your device and as such that storage disk becomes incredibly valuable. Yet as you may have already experienced, hard drives can go belly up and lose all those important files; fortunately data recovery software such as CleverFiles’ Disk Drill or Stellar Mac Data Recovery are lifesaving solutions in such situations. Best of all, they are free to download and test to see whether it is possible to restore the data from a failed hard drive. But it’s better to start this process with a little education first, so which of these two tools is the one for you?

While the speed of quick search is mostly on a par with Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery’s, the deep scan takes a good deal of time; depending on the storage capacity of the connected hard drive it could take tens of hours to finish. But when the scan is done, it’s very easy to identify the lost files using the filters included in the software alongside the search field and Quick Look features.

CleverFiles’ Disk Drill is free to download and test, and users need only upgrade to the Pro version if they find the recoverable files they’re looking for, which is why the company doesn’t offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. For the $89 Pro license users can use it on three Mac computers, however. And if you are stuck with an issue and the site’s help section doesn’t provide enough info, then it’s possible to reach out to support via live chat or email to get answers fairly quickly.

Data Recovery’s feature set is limited when compared to Disk Drill’s and it is able to identify fewer file types (190 and growing, but the latter is able to recover more than 200 types). Speed-wise, Stellar’s quick search is on par with Disk Drill’s but cannot beat it in a deep scan. In our tests, a deep scan of a 2TB external drive took 19 hours for Stellar and 16 for Disk Drill. To prevent against future data loss the latter includes a feature called Guaranteed Recovery, which we would like to see in Stellar’s software as well.

Searching through the results is a little sluggish, too, so it’s easier to narrow down the results by data type and make good use of the preview option, which still works fine while scanning the hard drive. The free version is limited to scanning but the $79 yearly subscription will unlock data recovery.