Ever found yourself asking any of these questions? This article is here to give you the definitive answers.

Disk Drill for Mac and Windows

First of all, yes, Disk Drill for Mac may differ from Disk Drill for Windows in both UI and the recovery backend, but not that much as it may seem. It is our ultimate goal to get Disk Drill for Mac and Windows as close as possible in terms of user experience and data recovery quality. The UI may stay different, or may get closer to one another, this is something we are still unsure of.

But it’s most likely that Disk Drill editions for different platforms will compete with one another at every point of time. This is mostly related to the fact that the two major end-user operating systems (macOS and Windows) are heavily different in the way they treat low-level data access. And Disk Drill is not a regular app like Instagram or Flappy Bird. Disk Drill is a data platform for all your system needs: backup, recovery, protection, disk health, space management and more. And to accomplish all of those low-level tasks successfully as a market leader it needs some serious backend power-ups, and that comes at a cost.

Disk Drill for Mac and Windows share many internal modules, but disk access inside each of them is a variable that cannot be easily cross-compiled. Multiple extra modules (like Clean Up) that you may be seeing in each of the editions are also platform-dependent. Additionally, the development micro-teams we organize behind each of our products are different. They may overlap in mind and code sharing to a certain extent, but for production quality reasons we strive to keep our experts dedicated to one solution per sprint or major release.

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These are some of the reasons why you may experience slight feature deviation between our two mainstream data restoration utilities that share the same name but work on different platforms: Disk Drill for macOS and Windows. Again, we do believe that both editions have to eventually offer the same features, but it’s not always possible to release the same functionality symmetrically for two very different eco-systems. Hence the price difference for Mac and PC users.

The following chart is here to give you a deeper understanding of how Disk Drill for Mac OS X and Disk Drill for Windows compare to each other.

Disk Drill 5 for Mac Disk Drill 5 for Windows
Free version Undelete protected data + Preview all recovery methods Recovers 500 MB for free
OS support macOS 10.15+ Windows 10+, Server 2016+ (only x64 editions)
Version in comparison 5.6 5.6
PRO version cost USD$89 USD$89
Supported filesystems
Native scan of HFS/HFS+/HFSX Yes Partial
(signature scan only)
Native scan of APFS Yes Partial
(signature scan only)
Native scan of FAT/FAT32/exFAT Yes Yes
Native scan of NTFS/NTFS5 Yes Yes
Native scan of ReFS Yes Yes
Native scan of EXT2/EXT3/EXT4 Yes Yes
Native scan of BTRFS Yes Yes
Scans
Deep Scan: file signatures 400+ 400+
Scan to locate lost partitons
Yes Yes
Formatted Drives Yes Yes
RAW devices scan
Yes Yes
RAID Recovery and reconstruction Yes Yes
NAS & Linux via SSH recovery Yes Yes
FireWire/USB Drives Yes Yes
Classic iPods (non-iOS) Yes Yes
iOS data recovery Yes Coming soon
Android data recovery Yes No
Rebuild a corrupted HFS+ catalog directory
Yes No
Additional capabilities
Recovery chances
Yes Yes
Create and load disk images
Yes Yes
Save and load scan sessions Yes Yes
Preview and recovery during scan
Yes Yes
Bad sectors management Yes No
Bootable drive Yes
(internet recovery boot mode)
No
Forensic features Yes No
Data loss prevention Recovery Vault & Guaranteed Recovery Recovery Vault
Convenient file-to-file preview QuickLook Preview everything your PC can preview
Data view (HEX) Yes Yes
Mount recovery results Yes Yes
File labeling by meta-data Yes Yes
Preview with thumbnails Yes Yes
Filter by file types Yes Yes
Search in results Yes Yes
(with masks)
Automatic convenient update process Yes Yes
Extra tools
Built-in Disk Clean Up Yes Yes
Disk Health Monitoring Yes Yes
Built-in Data Shredder Yes No
Built-in Erase Free Space Yes No
Built-in Duplicate finder Yes No
macOS Installer Yes No
.updated: November 18, 2024 author: CleverFiles Team