Review of DiskDigger – a Free File Recovery Program

In my article on the Top 3 Free File Recovery Programs, I picked Diskdigger as one of my top 3. You can probably guess how I’m going to rate this product in the end. As I mentioned already, DiskDigger is a free file recovery program that will let you attempt to recover deleted files on your hard drive or other types of media.

Here are some of the features available in DiskDigger:

• Support for recovery of multiple file types including photo, video, music and document (Word, Excel, etc.)
• Supports preview of recoverable files without needing to fully recover the file – allows you to see what it’s able to recovery before going through the recovery process.
• Supports any type of readable media – Hard drive, USB thumbdrives, Disk images, etc.
• Supports FAT and NTFS formatted media.
• DiskDigger is a self-contained executable – No other files are installed and nothing is written to the computer when using DiskDigger as all operations are performed in memory.
• Quick and “Advanced” scans supports scanning the file system and at the physical layer for recoverable files.

When looking for a file recovery application, I’m looking for a few things – the ability to preview what has been found, quick and thorough scans and some sort of search features for recoverable files. DiskDigger supports all of these features.

Based on the single file executable (no installation!) to the easy to use and easy to comprehend user interface, DiskDigger’s focus is on usability. When starting the program up, you first determine if you want to scan physical drives (such as Compact Flash, USB memory drives, etc) or logical drives (C:, D:, etc.). You also have the option here to scan a disk image – a nice feature to have available.

After selecting a “deep” or “deeper” scan, DiskDigger presents you with the list of files it found. In keeping with the theme of usability, DiskDigger gives a preview of the data it found allowing you to pick and choose the files you wish to recover.

I found the user interface to be refreshingly simple to use and the fact I don’t need to install anything to use DiskDigger is like frosting on the cake.

As for finding lost files, DiskDigger does just as well as other solutions. Recovering lost files isn’t magic – it’s not going to find something you deleted ten years ago and it’s not going to repair a broken file. This is just the nature of how writable media works – it’s not a limitation of DiskDigger.