Compare We streamlined our evaluation parameters into several clear categories. | Overall Winner | |
| Compatibility | ||
| Recovery Rate | ||
| Usability | ||
| File Type Support | ||
| Speed | ||
| Found files and Recovery quality | 200,000 Found files Good 100% Corrupted 0% Lost 0% | 0 Found files Good 0% Corrupted 0% Lost 100% |
| PRO Version | $89.00 / Perpetual Lifetime | $119.95 / Lifetime Lifetime |
| Read full Disk Drill review | Read full DiskWarrior review |
Introduction
In this comparison, we pit against each other two generations of data recovery software for macOS: Disk Drill and DiskWarrior.
Disk Drill has all the style of a young fashion model, but can it offer more besides pretty looks? DiskWarrior, on the other hand, goes back to the PowerPC era, and its user interface certainly has more than a few wrinkles on it, which we would be willing to overlook if it could perform its job with the confidence and elegance of a master craftsperson—but can it? Let’s find out!
Disk Drill for macOS is one of those apps that make screenshots of the macOS operating system look good. While data recovery is what it's known for the most, the app comes with a nice collection of extra tools that cover everything from data protection to secure data erasure.
DiskWarrior for macOS is a disk repair tool that promises to restore access to lost data by fixing common and not-so-common file system issues. The tool has been around since 1998, but its development has stalled in recent years.
Top Disk Drill Pros
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Two for one. When you buy Disk Drill for Mac, you also unlock Disk Drill for Windows.
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Abundance of extra utilities. Included with Disk Drill for Mac are many extra free utilities that greatly increase the value of the software.
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Structured scan results. Disk Drill groups scan results into three main categories (Deleted, Existing, and Reconstructed), and it provides advanced filters to help you find what you're looking for.
Top DiskWarrior Pros
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Repair capabilities. DiskWarrior shines when it comes to repairing drives whose file system has been damaged, triggering errors in Disk Utility and preventing files from being accessible.
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Bootable recovery. The program can boot into the standard macOS recovery and repair HFS and HFS+ system disks that have stopped booting.
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Disk optimization. The program can scan HFS and HFS+ disks and analyze them for directory index fragmentation. In theory, this can increase disk performance.
Top Disk Drill Cons
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Phone support. No phone number to call for support is provided.
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No disk cloning. Disk Drill doesn't offer disk cloning features, but creates convenient byte-by-byte backups for better data recovery from unstable drives.
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Bootable drives. The software doesn't have an option to create custom boot drives.
Top DiskWarrior Cons
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Strange behavior. On startup, the application always minimizes all other open windows for some reason, which can be quite annoying when you have multiple other windows opened.
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File system support. DiskWarrior supports only HFS and HFS+ drives. That’s a huge downside considering that Apple has been using APFS as its default file system for some time now.
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Trial version. The developers of DiskWarrior don’t offer a free trial version, so there’s no way for customers to test the software for free.
Pricing • Business model
| 1 | Distributed as | Freemium | Paid |
| 2 | Trial version available | ||
| 3 | Trial version limitations | Free preview | No trial |
| 4 | Number of devices per license |
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| 5 | Starting price | $89.00/ Perpetual | $119.95/ Lifetime |
| 6 | License model | Lifetime | Lifetime |
| 7 | No credit card to try | ||
| 8 | Money back guarantee | ||
| 9 | See Plans & Pricing | Pricing details | Pricing details |
Disk Drill is a freemium software application, which means there’s a free version that you can download without paying to test what it can do and how well it performs in real-life data loss situations. The biggest limitation of the free version is its inability to recover found files. The application can only preview them to confirm their recoverability. A PRO license can forever unlock Disk Drill’s recovery capabilities for $89.00.
DiskWarrior doesn’t offer a free version, and it also doesn’t provide a money-back guarantee. That’s bad news for those who don’t want to shell out $119.95 to buy software that’s not guaranteed to work properly or deliver satisfactory results.
Data Recovery Performance
Our data recovery performance tests are designed to determine how well can data recovery software applications recover lost files from damaged or missing partitions.
Clever In-Depth Scan of File Systems
| 1 | HFS+ partitions | Full support | Not supported |
| 2 | APFS partitions | Full support | Not supported |
| 3 | FAT32 partitions | Full support | Not supported |
| 4 | exFAT partitions | Partial support | Not supported |
| 5 | NTFS partitions | Full support | Not supported |
| 6 | EXT4 partitions | Not supported | Not supported |
Even though Disk Drill costs less than DiskWarrior, it delivers vastly superior data recovery results because it can actually recognize and recover hundreds of file formats using its Clever In-Depth Scan algorithms. The application failed to pass only our EXT4 recovery test because it doesn’t support the Linux file system. That’s understandable considering that Disk Drill is available only for macOS and Windows. What matters much more is the fact that Disk Drill can recover data even from the system drives of M1-powered and T2-encrypted Macs.
Quick Scan of File Systems
| 1 | FAT32 partitions | Partial support | Not supported |
| 2 | exFAT partitions | Partial support | Not supported |
| 3 | NTFS partitions | Full support | Not supported |
| 4 | EXT4 partitions | Partial support | Not supported |
| 5 | HFS+ partitions | Not supported | Not supported |
| 6 | APFS partitions | Partial support | Not supported |
DiskWarrior doesn’t have the ability to recover lost files from file system metadata. Disk Drill supports (at least to some extent) all commonly used Windows, Linux, and Mac file systems, making it an easy choice.
Other Scan Types
| 1 | The number of formats supported by deep scan | Some (≈400) | Not supported |
| 2 | Native deep scan of system drives on M1/M2-powered Macs | Full support | Not supported |
| 3 | Native deep scan of system drives on T2-encrypted Macs | Full support | Not supported |
| 4 | Native data recovery from local Time Machine snapshots | Full support | Not supported |
| 5 | Scan for lost partitions | Full support | Not supported |
| 6 | HFS+ directory rebuild | Full support | Full support |
| 7 | Recovered files' labeling | Full support | Not supported |
| 8 | Partial file recovery | Full support | Not supported |
| 9 | Disk images: scan and recovery | Full support | Partial support |
DiskWarrior is a one-trick pony that can only perform HFS+ directory rebuilds to recover data lost because of file system corruption. These days, such cases of data loss are rare because the HFS+ file system is no longer used by default on modern Macs. In contrast, Disk Drill can recognize hundreds of file formats and recover them even from M1/M2-powered and T2-encrypted Macs—not to mention Time Machine snapshots and disk images.
Real-Life Recovery Challenge
| 1 | Raw photo recovery | 100% | 0% |
| 2 | Video formats recovery | 99% | 0% |
| 3 | Document formats recovery | 89% | 0% |
As you can see, DiskWarrior couldn’t possibly deliver any worse results. In fact, the data recovery software didn’t manage to restore the original folder structure and file names of any files from our sample collection. The fact that many modern file systems, including APFS (the default file system of modern Macs), are not supported has a lot to do with the software’s poor performance, but the main reason is that DiskWarrior doesn’t have proper data recovery capabilities. It can only repair file system issues that cause files to become unavailable.
Feature Comparison
The feature comparison of Disk Drill and DiskWarrior produced contrasting results, as the summary table below shows.
In short, Disk Drill strives to deliver an excellent user experience across the board, and it takes a holistic approach to data recovery, giving users plenty of tools to not only recover their lost data but also address the root cause of the data loss (poor disk health, lack of backups, and so on). DiskWarrior’s features have become so outdated and neglected that they simply fail to deliver anything close to a positive user experience, which is a shame because the software used to be genuinely great.
Karma
90% | 52% | ||
| 1 | Update frequency | ||
| 2 | Updated recently | ||
| 3 | Changelog available | ||
| 4 | Latest macOS supported | ||
| 5 | Runs natively on M1/M2 Macs | ||
| 6 | Genuine or clone? | ||
| 7 | Brand name popularity | ||
| 8 | Online market share | ||
| 9 | Maturity | ||
| 10 | Extensive knowledge base | ||
| 11 | Helpdesk support | ||
| 12 | Live chat | ||
| 13 | Phone support |
DiskWarrior doesn’t stand a chance against Disk Drill because its developers have been neglecting the software for a long time. The last update was released in 2018, and that’s why you can’t even run DiskWarrior on Apple silicon Macs. It’s then quite surprising that Alsoft, Inc., the company behind DiskWarrior, still provides phone support. We would love to hear what Alsoft’s customers say about the software.
Usability
100% | 22% | ||
| 1 | Modern user-friendly interface | ||
| 2 | Dark mode | ||
| 3 | Easy-to-locate features | ||
| 4 | Automatic implementation of multiple appropriate scanning methods without user interaction | ||
| 5 | Auto-resuming scans of failing drives | ||
| 6 | Auto-resuming backups of failing drives | ||
| 7 | Convenient source selection on start | ||
| 8 | Convenient file-by-file preview of recoverable items | ||
| 9 | Convenient thumbnail preview of recoverable items | ||
| 10 | Mount recoverable items as disk | ||
| 11 | Built-in updater | ||
| 12 | Multiple view modes in scan results | ||
| 13 | Hex view for recoverable items | ||
| 14 | Filter recoverable items by type | ||
| 15 | Search recoverable items by file names | ||
| 16 | Sort results | ||
| 17 | Multilingual UI | ||
| 18 | Simple deployment |
When a software application stops receiving updates, it quickly becomes outdated and inconvenient to use when compared with modern alternatives. That’s precisely what happened to DiskWarrior. The application looks out of place on modern Macs, and it doesn’t have many features we expect data recovery software to have these days.
Device support
76% | 48% | ||
| 1 | Internal and external HDD | ||
| 2 | Internal and external SSD | ||
| 3 | USB thumb drives / Classic iPods (non-iOS) / FireWire devices | ||
| 4 | Memory cards | ||
| 5 | iOS devices | ||
| 6 | iOS backups | ||
| 7 | iCloud | ||
| 8 | Android devices | ||
| 9 | Recovery from RAID arrays | ||
| 10 | Encrypted device support | ||
| 11 | Unmountable partitions |
Smartphones and tablets were virtually unheard of when DiskWarrior was first released, so it probably won’t surprise you to read that the software can’t recover data from iOS and Android devices. Unfortunately, it also performs extremely poorly when recovering data from regular internal and external storage devices. Disk Drill is almost the exact opposite because the app can confidently recover even modern raw photo and video file formats.
Other notable recovery features
88% | 24% | ||
| 1 | Overall non-intrusive read-only algorithms | ||
| 2 | Network recovery | ||
| 3 | Effectively filters out corrupted scan results | ||
| 4 | Byte-to-byte device backups | ||
| 5 | Bootable recovery drive creation | ||
| 6 | Runs in macOS native recovery mode | ||
| 7 | Convenient scan session management | ||
| 8 | Bad sector management | ||
| 9 | Recovery chance prediction | ||
| 10 | RAID reconstructor | ||
| 11 | Disk vitals monitoring and tracking during scan | ||
| 12 | Data protection | ||
| 13 | Links to in-lab recovery service for physically damaged devices | ||
| 14 | Scan speed | ||
| 15 | Scan free space only | ||
| 16 | Start file recovery without interrupting the scan | ||
| 17 | Preview recoverable items without interrupting the scan | ||
| 18 | Forensic features |
Disk Drill takes a holistic approach to data recovery, giving users plenty of tools to not only recover their lost data but also address the root cause of the data loss (poor disk health, lack of backups, and so on). DiskWarrior’s features have become so outdated and neglected that they simply fail to deliver anything close to a positive user experience, which is a shame because the software used to be genuinely great.
Extras
69% | 0% | ||
| 1 | Disk space mapping | ||
| 2 | Disk clean up | ||
| 3 | Corrupted photo repair tool | ||
| 4 | Corrupted video repair tool | ||
| 5 | Time Machine backups parser | ||
| 6 | S.M.A.R.T. | ||
| 7 | Bootable macOS installer | ||
| 8 | Duplicate finder | ||
| 9 | Built-in disk space secure eraser | ||
| 10 | Disk cloning | ||
| 11 | Disk surface test | ||
| 12 | Secure data shredding |
Disk Drill greatly increases the value it delivers by including many extra features related to data recovery. For example, the application can recover data directly from Time Machine backups, and it can monitor the health of storage devices to help users avoid data loss disasters. DiskWarrior, unfortunately, doesn’t come with basically any extra features, except for bootable recovery drive creation.
Wrapping Up
DiskWarrior has suffered a crushing defeat in this data recovery software comparison. Despite its relatively young age, Disk Drill for macOS has scored more points in every category, making it a much better choice for Mac users who have lost important data and want to get it back without spending money on professional data recovery services.
Disk Drill for macOS is a data recovery software app even Apple would be proud of, and you can try it for free.
Visit developer's websiteWhy choose Disk Drill
Read full Disk Drill for Mac reviewWhy choose DiskWarrior
Read full DiskWarrior reviewMore software comparisons
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David Morelo is a professional content writer with a specialization in data recovery. He spends his days helping users from around the world recover from data loss and address the numerous issues associated with it.
When not writing about data recovery techniques and solutions, he enjoys tinkering with new technology, working on personal projects, exploring the world on his bike, and, above all else, spending time with his family.
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Houston, Texas, United States
Nikolay Lankevich has over 15 years of strong experience in various fields and platform includes Disaster Recovery, Windows XP/7. System analysis, design, application (Inter/Intranet) development, and testing. Provided technical supports on desktop and laptops on Win-XP and Macintosh for about 2000 employees.