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- DiskWarrior vs Data Rescue
DiskWarrior vs Data Rescue for macOS
| 5.1.1112 Released 31st Jan, 2023 | Current version |
| macOS 10.15-13.0 | Requirements |
| Free preview | Trial version limit |
| $75 $89 / Perpetual | Starting Price |
| 200,000 Found files Good 100% Corrupted 0% Lost 0% | Found files and Recovery quality |
| Easy | Usability |
2.26
3.26
| 5.2 Released 1st Sep, 2018 | Current version | 6.0.7 Released 2nd Jun, 2022 |
| macOS 10.5.8-11.0 | Requirements | macOS 10.12-13.0 |
| No trial | Trial version limit | Preview only |
| $119.95 / LifetimeLifetime | Starting Price | $19.00 / 1 fileSubscription |
| 0 Found files Our data recovery tool tests are based on creating new partitions and deleting them to see how the application performs in different data loss scenarios. Since this utility program is designed mainly for repairing file systems, it was unable to restore the deleted partitions and, therefore, failed the tests. Good 0% Corrupted 0% Lost 100% | Found files and Recovery quality | 152,354 Found files Good 52% Corrupted 24% Lost 24% |
| Hard | Usability | Normal |
Introduction
With so many similar yet at the same time different data recovery tools on the market, it can be difficult to quickly find the one that would suit your needs. If you’re stuck deciding between DiskWarrior and Data Rescue, this comparison should help you choose between these two long-established utility programs.
Our goal is to provide you with an unprejudiced description and comparison of these data recovery applications to help you decide between them quickly and easily. To accomplish that, our team has carried out extensive testing of the utility programs’ features and gathered results to give an accurate evaluation of the data recovery tools.
DiskWarrior for Mac is one of the oldest utility programs designed by Alsoft for scanning disk file systems errors and fixing the issues that make files inaccessible. But because of the lack of updates, it has become slightly outdated.
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 Data Rescue Pros
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Mail alerts. Software can notify its users by email when it finds bad sectors.
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Hex editor. The software comes with a Hex editor that can be used to analyze the entire content of the connected storage device.
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Virtual RAID. Data Rescue for Mac can assemble virtual RAID arrays, which can help in repairing broken disk sets.
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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Development. The last update was released in 2018. Since then, not a single update has been released. On the official website, the developers have been promising a major new update with support for APFS for more than 2 years now, but nobody knows when it will arrive.
Top Data Rescue Cons
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Inability to scan system disks. Since macOS 10.13 High Sierra, Data Rescue can’t scan system disks directly. The user has to boot into Recovery Mode first.
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Unreliable bootable recovery. To scan system drives, Data Rescue offers a bootable recovery option, but it didn’t work well on our Mac running the latest version of macOS.
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Needs the internet at all times. Data Rescue for Mac requires a constant connection to the internet to validate the license.
Pricing • Business model
| 1 | Distributed as | Paid | Freemium |
| 2 | Trial version available | ||
| 3 | Trial version limitations | No trial | Preview only |
| 4 | Number of devices per license |
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| 5 | Starting price | $119.95/ Lifetime | $19.00/ 1 file |
| 6 | License model | Lifetime | Subscription |
| 7 | No credit card to try | ||
| 8 | Money back guarantee | ||
| 9 | See Plans & Pricing | Pricing details | Pricing details |
DiskWarrior does not offer a free trial for its potential customers, which is a major downside since you’ll need to purchase its license for $119.95, and there’s always a chance that you won’t be satisfied with the product.
While Data Rescue, on the other hand, has a trial version available, so you’ll be able to scan your device with this data recovery tool and preview the discovered files. And if you’re happy with the scan results, you’ll have two options: either get the standard license (and choose to pay for each file you recover, for 100 file recoveries, or 1 drive recovery) or the professional one for the unlimited drive recovery.
Data Recovery Performance
Clever In-Depth Scan of File Systems
| 1 | FAT32 partitions | Not supported | Not supported |
| 2 | exFAT partitions | Not supported | Not supported |
| 3 | NTFS partitions | Not supported | Not supported |
| 4 | EXT4 partitions | Not supported | Not supported |
| 5 | HFS+ partitions | Not supported | Full support |
| 6 | APFS partitions | Not supported | Not supported |
Having a Deep Scan (Clever In-Depth Scan) feature allows you to perform a more thorough scan of your device to recover data that has been lost a while ago because of basic human error or in more severe data loss scenarios.
Since DiskWarrior is a disk repair tool, not a data recovery one, it isn’t equipped with this scan type. On the other hand, Disk Rescue does offer the Deep Scan (Clever In-Depth Scan of File Systems) feature, but after testing it out, we managed to use it to restore lost data only from a drive with the HFS+ file system.
Quick Scan of File Systems
| 1 | FAT32 partitions | Not supported | Not supported |
| 2 | exFAT partitions | Not supported | Poor performance |
| 3 | NTFS partitions | Not supported | Partial support |
| 4 | EXT4 partitions | Not supported | Not supported |
| 5 | HFS+ partitions | Not supported | Partial support |
| 6 | APFS partitions | Not supported | Partial support |
Quick Scan is great for recovering files that were recently deleted from your device because of simple data loss reasons (for example, after emptying Trash on your Mac). DiskWarrior doesn’t support Quick Scan since the purpose of the tool isn’t to recover files but to repair damaged directories, non-mountable partitions, and faulty file systems.
As you see from the chart above, Data Rescue did slightly better than the other data recovery tool. But even though it comes with the Quick Scan feature and did a fine job scanning and recovering data on NTFS, HFS+, and APFS drives and partitions, it was unable to discover all of the deleted files on an exFAT formatted drive and had zero success with FAT32 devices since it doesn’t support such file systems.
Other Scan Types
| 1 | The number of formats supported by deep scan | Not supported | Some (≈150) |
| 2 | Native deep scan of system drives on M1/M2-powered Macs | Not supported | Not supported |
| 3 | Native deep scan of system drives on T2-encrypted Macs | Not supported | Not supported |
| 4 | Native data recovery from local Time Machine snapshots | Not supported | Not supported |
| 5 | Scan for lost partitions | Not supported | Not supported |
| 6 | HFS+ directory rebuild | Full support | Not supported |
| 7 | Recovered files' labeling | Not supported | Not supported |
| 8 | Partial file recovery | Not supported | Full support |
| 9 | Disk images: scan and recovery | Partial support | Full support |
In terms of additional scan types, it’s absolutely clear that Data Rescue has more to offer for the user than DiskWarrior. It has deep scan support for some file formats, which is better than nothing. Also, it does a good job of scanning disk images and recovering its files.
Whereas there’s only one perk that DiskWarrior has to offer in this section, which is HFS+ directory rebuild. So this utility program will do an excellent job in detecting and fixing issues on your device. But unfortunately, this tool is limited only to that.
Real-Life Recovery Challenge
| 1 | Raw photo recovery | 0% | 38% |
| 2 | Video formats recovery | 0% | 51% |
| 3 | Document formats recovery | 0% | 74% |
Our tests revealed that DiskWarrior was unable to recover none of the file formats listed above. And the reason for that is simple — this utility program isn’t meant for recovering data; its purpose is to fix file system issues.
Data Rescue did a much better job: even though the list of file formats that it was able to detect and recover is not as extensive as one might wish, this data recovery tool successfully restored the most common photo, video, and document file formats (including JPG, NEF, MOV, MP4, DOCX, PDF, PPT, and others).
Feature Comparison
Karma
43% | 67% | ||
| 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 was last updated in 2018, and even though its developers have been promising to release one soon, no changes have been made since. Because of that, the application is lacking in many features and is way behind in terms of compatibility (it still doesn’t support APFS formatted drives, M1 Macs, and the latest macOS versions). And since DiskWarrior doesn’t have automatic updates, you’ll need to monitor their site and manually update the tool when a new version becomes available (if it actually becomes available).
On the bright side, DiskWarrior has fully working phone support and help desk support for their customers. So if you encounter any issues within the disk repair application, you’ll have an easy way to get some help.
Data Rescue scored a bit higher in this section since its developers are trying to keep up with the modern data recovery software tendencies by more or less regularly releasing updates for this tool. And it offers slightly more than DiskWarrior in terms of support.
Usability
22% | 33% | ||
| 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 |
Device support
59% | 59% | ||
| 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 RAID1, 0, JBOD | ||
| 10 | Encrypted device support | ||
| 11 | Unmountable partitions |
Other notable recovery features
18% | 33% | ||
| 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 |
It can be pretty helpful in some data recovery situations for the utility tool to be equipped with extra features, for example, to create a disk image of your device for a safer recovery process. If that’s what you’re looking for, Data Rescue has it. But that’s simply just it, only one extra recovery feature worth mentioning.
And the same is on DiskWarrior’s side: its only additional data recovery perk is the ability to create bootable recovery drives.
Extras
0% | 23% | ||
| 1 | Disk space mapping | ||
| 2 | Disk clean up | ||
| 3 | Corrupted video repair tool | ||
| 4 | Corrupted photo 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 |
Wrapping Up
A basic data recovery utility program suitable for all users no matter their tech skills and capable of handling various data loss scenarios of different complexity.
Visit developer's websiteWhy choose Data Rescue
Read full Data Rescue for macOS reviewWhy choose DiskWarrior
Read full DiskWarrior reviewMore software comparisons
2.26
4.79
3.81
4.79
2 publishings
Waterford, Michigan, United States
Romana Levko is a freelance content writer with extensive experience in the technology field. She’s been creating dive-deep explainers, how-to articles, and guides to help the average user find simple answers to complex issues.
Her main area of interest has been data recovery on Macs for a long time now. Therefore, through her work, she strives to educate people on various data loss scenarios and help them find hassle-free yet effective solutions for recovering their lost files.
Frisco, Texas, United States
Yevgeniy Tolkunov is Hardware Engineer at ACE Data Recovery. Yevgeniy has a Master's Degree in Physics, Information Technology; 15+ years of experience.