Disk Drill refund policy vs our 30-day guarantee

Disk Drill's policy, in its own words

On the Disk Drill PRO page (https://www.cleverfiles.com/pro.html), checked on 2026-09-11, purchases are described as "non-refundable, except where refunds are required by applicable consumer protection laws."

Read plainly: the sale is final unless a law where you live says otherwise. Some jurisdictions do give consumers a statutory right to a refund on digital purchases in particular circumstances, and the policy defers to those rights — but it doesn't add anything on top of them. Whether you qualify depends on where you are and the specifics of your case, not on whether the software recovered your files. If you buy PRO after a promising preview and the recovered file turns out to be corrupted, the policy as written doesn't provide a way back.

Two neighbouring facts from the same page, for context: PRO is sold as either a one-year subscription or a lifetime license, and it's licensed to 1 user across 3 devices. Both models are reasonable. It's the finality of the purchase that we think buyers should weigh.

Our guarantee, in plain terms

The short version: if DataRecover Pro can't recover your files, you don't pay. The full policy is on our refund page; here's what it says without the legal framing.

If you buy a plan and the software is unable to recover the files you needed, email support from the address you purchased with within 30 days and we issue a full refund to your original payment method via Stripe, typically within a few business days. We review every request in good faith. The Annual plan can be cancelled at any time from your billing portal, which stops future renewals while your access runs to the end of the paid period; the Lifetime plan is a one-time purchase with nothing to cancel.

There's one fair-use condition, and we'd rather you hear it from us than discover it: because scanning and preview are free and unlimited, requests that reflect successful use of the paid features — recovering or repairing a large batch of files and then asking for the money back — may not qualify. The guarantee exists for the case where the tool couldn't do the job, not as a free rental.

Why the difference matters more than the price

A preview is strong evidence, not proof. A thumbnail can render from a file whose second half was overwritten; a video can show a first frame and still fail to play past it. Every recovery tool, ours included, sometimes brings back a file that looked fine in preview and isn't. Under a non-refundable policy, that outcome is your cost. Under a guarantee, it's ours — which changes how careful a vendor has to be about what its preview promises.

It also shapes the product. Because we're on the hook when a file comes back broken, DataRecover Pro repairs on the way out: it rebuilds JPEG, PNG, GIF, MP4/MOV, PDF, and DOCX files, extracts intact images from damaged RAW, HEIC, TIFF, and archives, and salvages a partial result when that's what survives — locally, in a sandboxed worker, with nothing uploaded. Disk Drill's video repair, by contrast, is offered as a separate cloud-based "Online Video Repair" service. Fewer broken results means fewer refunds; the incentive points the right way.

What both vendors get right

Both offer a free scan with preview before you pay anything, and both should be used that way. Never buy recovery software blind. Run the free scan, look at the previews of the specific files you care about, and only then buy — from whichever vendor actually showed them to you. If you do that, the refund policy becomes a backstop rather than a first resort. It's still worth knowing which backstop you've got.

The verdict

Disk Drill's policy is what it says: final sale, except where the law intervenes. Ours is a 30-day guarantee tied to one condition — that the software couldn't recover your files. Combine that with a known price ($89 lifetime or $59 a year, 3 Macs), no account to buy, and repair built into the same local app, and the risk of trying DataRecover Pro is about as low as this category allows. Scan free, preview, then decide.