Disk Drill vs partrevive

Disk Drill scans storage devices to find and recover deleted, lost, or damaged files. It runs on macOS 10.15 or later and Windows 10 or later, and supports internal and external drives, SSDs, USB drives, memory cards, cameras, RAID arrays, virtual disks, and disk images. The free Basic edition scans storage and previews recoverable files; Windows users can recover up to 100 MB without upgrading. PRO provides unlimited data recovery and recovery methods including Quick & Deep Scan and Lost Partition Search. It also covers both supported operating systems under one license, with activation on up to three devices by one user. The free edition includes Recovery Vault metadata protection and byte-level backups. PRO costs $89 a year for an annual subscription or $149 as a one-time purchase for a lifetime license. PRO is for personal use, while Enterprise is listed for multiple users and includes priority technical support and forensic data export. PRO purchases are non-refundable except where consumer protection laws require refunds.

partrevive is a free, MIT-licensed utility for finding and recovering lost or deleted partition tables. It scans disks for filesystem signatures, then checks candidate filesystems through read-only loop devices and mounts to distinguish live data from ghosts. Commands cover scanning, verification, planning, file rescue, table restoration, automatic recovery, undo and disk imaging; a Tkinter interface guides users through scanning, verification, planning and restoration. The project lists NTFS, FAT12/16/32, exFAT, ext2/3/4, btrfs, XFS, F2FS and Linux swap as detected formats. It reports LVM2 and LUKS but does not rebuild them. GPT is the default restore format; MBR is available with `--mbr` and is limited to four primary partitions. Imaging uses ddrescue in two passes with a mapfile, and recovery can use a disk image. Before writing, restore and auto save the current table and check SMART health; restore prompts by default and refuses a mounted target. The single-file Python 3 program requires root and Linux system tools on PATH. The project is described as early, and fragmented or overwritten filesystems may mount incompletely.