Disk Drill 1.3

Disk Drill is a comprehensive data protection and recovery tool. It allows you to prevent data loss by protecting your hard drives and to recover files that have already been deleted or lost.

Disk Drill's Recovery Vault is a feature that scans your disks, and it detects when files are deleted, so you can go back and restore them from within Disk Drill even after the Trash has been emptied.

Disk Drill does a good job of finding and recovering files that have been deleted in the past. It has a few filtering options and different scanning modes. The first thing you do to start searching for deleted files is select the hard drive, and then select the type of files you look for. You can also search for 'any' file type, but that will probably take longer.

In my testing, I intentionally deleted a .MOV file and then emptied the trash. Started this app, and scanned my hard drive, looking for video files only. Disk Drill found the file and it let me even preview it using Mac OS X Quick Look feature. This file was the only file found, and I am sure I have deleted other video files from that disk before. Maybe Disk Drill can find only recently-deleted files using the Quick scan mode.

There is a free version, but with the limitation that you can't recover any files; you can only see which files are recoverable.