What Disk Drill Basic actually does on a Mac (and what it doesn't)

What "free" means in the Mac edition

Disk Drill for Mac comes in a free Basic edition and a paid PRO edition. Based on the vendor's product page as checked on 2026-09-11, Basic on macOS lets you scan a drive and preview the files it finds; actually recovering a file requires PRO. There is no free recovery allowance in the Mac Basic edition. If you've read a review mentioning a free-recovery quota, check whether it applies to the Mac build before counting on it — as of our check it does not.

That's not a criticism. Scan-and-preview is the honest way to run a recovery trial: you find out whether your files are there before money changes hands. It's also exactly how DataRecover Pro's free tier works. What matters is knowing where the line is before you're standing at it with a drive full of missing photos.

What Basic does give you

A full scan and a real preview are worth having. You can run Disk Drill Basic against the drive, see whether the files you lost show up, and open previews to judge whether they look intact. That's enough to make an informed decision. The vendor's page also lists some free utility extras alongside Basic; we won't enumerate them here because the list changes — check the current page for what's included.

One habit worth carrying into any tool's free tier: if the drive is failing, image it once and run every scan against the image instead of the dying hardware. Check the vendor's page for whether imaging is included in Basic; it's included in DataRecover Pro's free tier.

Where it stops

The moment you click Recover. From there you're buying PRO, which the vendor sells as either a one-year subscription or a lifetime license, licensed to 1 user across 3 devices. We're not going to print a price — review sites quote figures, but pricing changes and you should read it from the source. Two things are worth knowing before you buy, both taken from the vendor's PRO page as checked on 2026-09-11:

First, refunds. Purchases are described as "non-refundable, except where refunds are required by applicable consumer protection laws." If a previewed file recovers corrupted, the policy doesn't give you a way back that your local law doesn't already provide. Second, repair. Disk Drill's video repair is offered as a separate cloud-based "Online Video Repair" service, which means uploading the damaged clip rather than fixing it on your Mac.

How DataRecover Pro's free tier compares

The free part is the same idea: scan any drive, preview everything found — thumbnails, metadata, Quick Look, and a per-file confidence score — with no limit and no account. If the preview doesn't show your files, you've lost nothing but a few minutes.

The paid part is where the two diverge. DataRecover Pro's price is on the pricing page: $89 once for a lifetime license or $59 a year, covering 3 Macs, and buying doesn't require creating an account. Repair is built into the app and runs locally in a sandboxed worker: it rebuilds JPEG, PNG, GIF, MP4/MOV, PDF, and DOCX files, extracts intact images from damaged RAW, HEIC, TIFF, and archives, and salvages partial results otherwise — no upload, no separate service. It also recovers from APFS checkpoints and snapshots, unlocks encrypted APFS volumes, and images drives byte-for-byte. And if it can't recover your files, you don't pay: there's a 30-day guarantee.

The right way to use both free tiers

Run both. Both scan read-only, so there's no harm in a second opinion, and the two engines don't always find the same things. Compare the previews side by side. Then pay for the one that actually shows you the files you need — and read that vendor's refund terms before you do.

The verdict

Disk Drill Basic on a Mac is a free scan-and-preview tool, and a decent one; it is not free recovery. DataRecover Pro's free tier does the same job with the same limits. The choice is really about the paid step: a known price, no account, local repair, and a 30-day guarantee on one side; a subscription-or-lifetime license with a no-refund policy and cloud video repair on the other. Preview with both, then decide with your files on the screen.