Free tier: what you actually get back
Disk Drill's Basic plan lets you preview everything a scan finds but caps how much you can actually restore for free, in the low hundreds of megabytes, before it asks you to upgrade to Pro. RecuvaDownload's free scan-and-restore has no such cap — anything the scan finds, you can restore, regardless of total size.
Feature scope
- Disk Drill adds a Recovery Vault, S.M.A.R.T. drive health monitoring, and byte-to-byte drive backups on top of recovery
- RecuvaDownload stays focused on scanning and restoring files, plus a portable no-install option and a secure file-erasing tool
- Both support quick and deep scan modes across internal drives, USB storage, and memory cards
Which one fits your situation
If you need one drive scanned and your files back today, RecuvaDownload's lack of a recovery cap and no-account requirement make it the faster path. If you're setting up ongoing protection against future data loss — not just recovering from one incident — Disk Drill's bundled backup and monitoring tools are a genuine reason to consider its paid tier.
Downloading & running RecuvaDownload
1. Install or extract it
Use the Windows or macOS button on this page. For the installer, run it with administrator rights; for the portable ZIP, extract it to a drive you're not scanning.
2. Scan, preview, restore
Pick the drive or device, run quick scan first, switch to deep scan if needed, then restore selected files to a different drive than the one you scanned.
FAQs
Yes, but recovery is capped at a few hundred megabytes on the free Basic plan — enough for documents or a handful of photos, not a full folder of video.
An optional paid edition exists for automated scheduled scans and priority support, but it's never required to recover files — the free tier has no recovery cap.