Recovery Vault is a Disk Drill feature that you can use to protect yourself from future data loss. Below you’ll find frequently asked questions about it. To learn how to enable and recover files with it, see How to Use Recovery Vault and Guaranteed Recovery.
When Recovery Vault is enabled to protect a particular drive or partition, Disk Drill uses a special background service to monitor that drive or partition for changes. When a file is deleted, Disk Drill remembers the metadata for the file.
Mac HFS/HFS+ hard drives do not save the metadata (filename, file location, etc.) for files that are deleted. This makes recovering files difficult, because without the filename, you may have to preview dozens – if not hundreds – of files to find the one you are looking for. If you protect a drive with Recovery Vault:
Recovery Vault saves the metadata of deleted files, but it does not save a copy of the file itself. While Recovery Vault greatly improves your chances of recovering a file, it does not guarantee it — the deleted files could be overwritten by new data and lost for good. Recovery Vault can protect any folder on your drive or partition, so not only can it help with files that were sent to the Trash, but it can also help recover files that were transferred to another disk. The Recovery Vault footprint is fairly small and it does not require a lot of storage space.
Guaranteed Recovery actually saves a complete copy of the file, making it much more likely that the file can be successfully recovered (thus the name “Guaranteed”). By default, it only monitors the Trash folder, so files lost through transfer to other disks are not protected. (But if you are running Mac OS 10.8, you can set it to monitor other folders as well.) Guaranteed Recovery also takes up a lot more hard drive space, since you have to store all those deleted files. The amount of storage space you allocate to it can be adjusted though. See Guaranteed Recovery FAQs for more information.
No, Recovery Vault is not particularly resource hungry. In our tests, hard disk speed changes from 1-3% when Disk Drill is doing internal Recovery Vault routines and it produces no noticeable slowdowns. It doesn’t use too much disk space either — with 10,000 files protected, the Recovery Vault file is only about 60MB. Learn more about Recovery Vault resource usage…
On a Mac, you can protect any drive or partition with an HFS+, FAT/FAT32 or ExFAT file system. Unfortunately, Recovery Vault cannot be enabled on APFS and raw partitions (the ones without a file system). Also, the protected partition has to be write/read enabled. Read-only partitions or disk images cannot be protected with Recovery Vault on Macs, which is why the NTFS file system is not supported. However, Disk Drill for Windows can protect NTFS logical volumes 🎉
External drives, such as external hard drives or USB flash drives, can be protected. The Recovery Vault file is stored on the external drive itself, so it can be updated on any Mac you connect it to that has Disk Drill installed. Keep in mind that if any file deletion occurs elsewhere (on an unprotected Mac or other device) Recovery Vault will not be updated. The drive needs to be directly connected to your Mac — mapped network drives cannot be protected.
Recovery Vault can protect any file type — it is not restricted to certain file types like Deep Scan recovery is. Recovery Vault is great for restoring applications, where multiple files in multiple locations are involved. Recovery Vault is also an effective way to recover plain text files like emails from Apple’s Mail app. Remember that Recovery Vault can only recover files from the folders it protects — to verify the specific folders being monitored, click on Protect and then click on Advance next to the drive or partition in question.
No. There is no need to enable Recovery Vault for a Time Machine volume, and your system could experience slowdowns if you enable protection on it. If you have Time Machine on a partitioned drive, you can enable protection on the non-Time-Machine partitions, and just leave the Time Machine partition unprotected.
No, we don’t recommend it. The activity in the system folder is enormous and trying to protect it may slow your Mac down. These aren’t normally the type of files you would need to recover anyway. With applications, licensed users can usually download a new copy of the app from the developer as needed, so backing them up is normally unnecessary.
On the Protect screen, where it shows the protection status of each drive or partition, you will see two options:
There are a few reasons why a file might not show up:
One issue with Recovery Vault is that it makes it easier for anyone who has access to your computer to recover your deleted files. If you wish to ensure your privacy, Disk Drill has a password option. Simply go to the menu bar and select Disk Drill > Preferences and then click on the Security tab. Enter your Master Password twice, and an email address that we can send your password to if you forgot it. (The email address is optional, but you will not be able to recover the password without it.) You do not need to click the Reset button — simply switch to another tab and your password will be saved. Once you have set the password, you will be asked for it every time Disk Drill is launched.
If you need to change your password, go back to the Security tab, enter your new password twice and click Reset. If you forget your password, click the “Forgot Password” button on the left when Disk Drill asks you for the password.
Remember, in some cases Recovery Vault can be used by forensic experts in their investigations.
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