Verifying recovery chances for DMG files

An Apple Disk Image (a file with DMG extension) is a disk image widely used in macOS. When opened or double-clicked, an Apple disk image gets “mounted” as a new volume in Finder. When mounted, you would usually see multiple files inside the new volume.

Many of us would have a need to recover deleted disk images. When you are looking to recover lost data from a Mac, chances are DMG files will be among those you will be expecting to retrieve. However, by default macOS will not show you the contents of a DMG file, which means in Disk Drill Basic there is no sure way to tell if the file can be recovered intact. Or is it?

In fact, there is a solution. As we previously explained, Disk Drill relies on the built-in preview mechanism of macOS, which is Quick Look. It does an amazing job of showing you contents of many hundreds of more or less common formats on Macs. Unfortunately, DMG is not one of them, and for DMG files you would usually get an icon, file name and the size, and not much more until you mount it to your Mac. However, Quick Look is very flexible and easily expandable by installing plugins. And you can get them mostly free. We recommend using BetterZIP for previewing multiple archives, DMG format and even winmail.dat. Tested. Works great and it’s that easy.

Let us know if you have other questions about previewing files in Disk Drill.