I just lost a big batch of work files on my external hard drive and I’m trying to pick the best data recovery software without wasting money. I’ve narrowed it down to Disk Drill and EaseUS, but reviews are all over the place about success rates, pricing, and hidden limits. For those who’ve actually used either (or both), which one gave you better value for the money, especially for recovering large, important files?
OK, so here is the version for people who hate fluff and want something they can use when their stomach is in knots because a drive went sideways.
I am not reviewing “features”. I am describing what happened to me, plus what keeps showing up when I help friends fix their mess.
If you want a second opinion after this, read this too:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataRecoveryHelp/comments/1qi1apk/disk_drill_review/
Rant first: how most people pick recovery tools
What I keep seeing: someone loses data, comes to a forum, asks “Tool A vs Tool B vs Tool C?” Then the replies look like spec sheet wars.
“Supports NTFS, FAT, exFAT, ext4.”
“Has quick scan and deep scan.”
“Unlimited recovery with license.”
That stuff looks neat when you are calm. When I lost files, I was not calm. My brain was half gone, my hands were shaking, and I kept thinking “if I screw this up one time, I might lose it all.”
You are not shopping for speakers. You are trying to not lose your wedding photos, client work, drone footage, or school project.
In that state, “more control” is not your friend. Fewer places to mess up is your friend.
What happened when I tried the usual “free” darling
First big failure story. External drive, suddenly RAW in Windows. Typical “oh crap” moment.
I went for a popular free tool everyone keeps linking on Reddit. Installed it. Opened it.
Right away it threw questions at me.
Scan type?
Exact file system?
Sector size?
Search by file signatures, and which ones?
I stared at it and thought: I plugged it in yesterday, it was fine, now it is broken, that is all I know. I do not have a time machine or a forensic lab. I want files, not a quiz.
I guessed my way through.
Scan took around 45 minutes. When it finished, I got:
• A huge wall of files with generic names
• No folder structure
• Weak or no preview for many of them
• A bunch of stuff labeled by file type only, often useless
• Some hex output I did not understand and did not want to
I picked a batch, recovered them, then checked.
Half the photos were broken. Some videos would not open. No warning beforehand. So I burned an hour, got junk, and felt worse.
Same drive, different day, different approach
Later, after cooling off and reading more posts, I tried Disk Drill on that same drive.
Experience looked nothing like the first one.
It opened to a simple list of drives. Each line had:
• Name
• Size
• File system
• Status info
I clicked the external. Hit one button. No “choose your own adventure” menus.
Within maybe 30 seconds the scan was already showing files in categories:
• Pictures
• Video
• Documents
• Audio
I could click a photo. Full preview showed right away. No guesswork. For videos, it let me play them inside the program. Each file had a small indicator for recovery chances: high, medium, low.
The same “RAW” drive that had given me a mess before took about ten minutes for Disk Drill to go through in a usable way. I previewed the stuff I cared about most, confirmed they opened, then hit recover and pointed it at another disk.
From panic to finished recovery was about 25 minutes, including download and install. No deep knowledge, no random guessing of scan modes.
That was the first time I went “ok, this is different.”
Control vs sanity
People often reply to threads with things like:
“X has more advanced settings.”
“Y lets you fine tune the scan.”
My question back is always:
Are you doing paid forensic work or running a lab?
If not, every extra menu is a landmine. More knobs means more ways to erase your chance of a clean recovery.
Disk Drill still has advanced stuff, but it tucks it away instead of throwing it at you on step one. You can:
• Look at separate scan methods
• Inspect raw results
• Open a hex viewer if you are into that kind of pain
The important point is you do not need any of that on your first try. It auto-runs its scan methods, merges what they find, and shows the results like a file manager, not like an exam.
What happens between “scan” and “recover” matters a lot
Most recovery tools treat the middle step like an afterthought. You run a scan and get some massive flat list or a half-baked folder tree, then you gamble.
Disk Drill’s middle part has been the most useful part for me:
• It shows recoverable folder structure when possible.
• On top of that, it groups by common types: Pictures, Video, Documents, Audio, Archives, etc.
• You can filter by file type, size, date, and by estimated recovery chances.
The preview is not a tiny box. It opens photos full size, plays video, shows page previews for documents.
The recovery chance labels have been close to reality in my use. If it says high, it tends to come back clean. If it says low, it tends to be trash. After a few hundred files done this way, I started trusting that rating and stopped wasting time saving low chance junk.
This turns the process into:
- Scan
- Preview only the stuff you care about
- Pick the good looking ones
- Recover once
Instead of:
- Scan
- Blindly recover 500 GB
- Sort through garbage later
If you use cameras, this part matters a lot more than you think
Here is a big thing I never see in surface-level comparisons.
SD cards from GoPros, DJI drones, Canon, Sony and so on do not behave like normal desktop storage. Those cameras scatter each video into chunks, fragments all over the card.
When the file system table gets wiped, you lose the “map” that says which chunk goes where.
Many tools do signature-based carving. They look for “this looks like the start of a video file,” read forward until something else starts, then save that as a file.
Problem: a real clip from a camera might be made from fragments that are far apart. So you end up with:
• A clip that plays for a short bit, then turns into noise
• Frames from another clip mixed in
• Players that crash or hang
• People thinking “I recovered the videos but they are all corrupt”
This is so common that I expect it any time someone mentions SD video and “corrupted”.
Disk Drill has a thing called Advanced Camera Recovery. I do not know the exact math behind it, but I have seen the results from it.
What it seems to do:
• Knows write patterns from specific camera brands
• Figures out which chunks belong to which recording
• Rebuilds longer clips in the original order
I ran a test on one of my own DJI drone cards that I had wiped. It had four long clips on it.
Disk Drill:
• Found all four
• Reconstructed them
• All four played straight through without glitches
Then I tested two other tools on that same card:
Tool 1:
Recovered four files that looked like video but none would play at all.
Tool 2:
Recovered a bunch of small fragments, some a few seconds long, most broken.
Same card. Same physical data present. Different logic. Very different outcome.
If you never shoot video, that feature will not matter to you. If you do anything with action cams, drones, or longer clips on SD cards, this is the one part that decides if your project is dead or not.
When the drive is physically dying
Another situation I hit: failing USB drive. Clicks. Slow mounts. Timeouts. Windows throwing I/O errors.
Instinct says “scan this right now before it dies.” That is what most people do.
Problem: scanning a dying drive means hammering it with reads across the whole surface. That increases the chance that it dies halfway through the process.
Every recovery lab I have spoken to says the same thing: image first, scan the image.
Disk Drill has a byte-to-byte backup mode that lets you create a clone image of a drive or partition. That part is not unique by itself. Plenty of tools do imaging.
The part that helped me is how it handles trouble spots while imaging:
• Pass one, it moves quickly through the drive and skips sectors that cause trouble.
• Later passes focus on the skipped parts, trying smaller reads to extract pieces.
• It shows a block map with colors for ok, pending, and failed areas.
You can pause and resume. You can see if the drive is getting worse.
With my bad USB drive, I went:
- Image with Disk Drill
- Unplug drive, put it away
- Scan the image file instead
I got everything I needed that way. The drive itself died a bit more than a week later. If I had hammered it with a full deep scan first, it would likely have given up halfway through and taken the rest with it.
S.M.A.R.T. monitoring that is not overcomplicated
Disk health stuff is usually full of weird terms and raw hex numbers.
Disk Drill reads S.M.A.R.T. data from hard drives and SSDs and displays it in normal language so you can see:
• High reallocated sectors
• Growing error counts
• Temperature issues
• High power on hours
I rely more on the simple “good / warning / bad” status plus a few key stats. Twice I caught drives that were starting to slide downhill. Both times I swapped them out before losing anything.
It fits the whole theme: not only pick up pieces after failure, but show you warning signs early so you back up before pairing panic with regret.
Recovery Vault: the thing I ignored at first
When I first saw Recovery Vault, I thought it was fluff. Some “nice to have” thing no one bothers to use.
Turns out it is more useful than it sounds.
You tell it which folders matter to you. It quietly tracks metadata for deleted files from those folders:
• Original file name
• Original location
• Some structure info
It does not keep full copies of the files, so it stays light on space and CPU.
Later, when you delete something by accident, Disk Drill has more info to reconstruct it with names and paths intact, not just raw blobs.
I pointed it at:
• Desktop
• Documents
• Work project folders
Months later I fat-fingered a delete. Opened Disk Drill, went to Recovery Vault, clicked recover. A few seconds later the file was back in place with its original name.
Without Vault, I would still probably get it back, but under some generic name in a mixed folder. That is no big deal for one file, but when you are dealing with hundreds, original names save a lot of time.
Using it on both Windows and Mac
I bounce between a Windows desktop and a MacBook. Disk Drill’s license covers both, so I did not need to buy it twice.
The part I ended up using more than expected is cross-platform scan sessions.
You can:
• Start a scan on Windows
• Save the session
• Open that session later on Mac and keep working on it
Or the reverse.
It helped in situations like:
• Starting a long scan on a desktop, then doing the file review later on a laptop somewhere else
• Scanning on the machine close to the drive, then recovering to another machine that had more free space
It is a small quality of life thing but when you are doing a long scan, it is nice not to be chained to one box.
Where it falls short
This is not magic. Some gaps:
• If you do heavy RAID work with weird controllers and need granular manual parameters, you might need pro-level tools.
• No native Linux support. You would need to work from Windows or Mac or use images created elsewhere.
For my own use, that has not been a deal breaker. For a lab, it might be.
How I would tell a friend to use it when stuff breaks
If you just lost data and you are reading this at 1 a.m., here is what I would do in your place:
- Stop writing to the drive. Do not install anything new on it. Do not copy files onto it.
- If the drive makes weird sounds or throws constant errors, use Disk Drill’s byte-to-byte backup to make an image first, then scan the image.
- Install Disk Drill on a different drive than the one you are trying to recover.
- Run a normal scan on the problem drive or image.
- When results show up, use filters and folders to narrow down to the stuff that matters.
- Preview every important file before recovery. Focus on high chance items first.
- Recover to a separate physical drive, not back onto the broken one.
If you use cameras or drones, check Advanced Camera Recovery for SD cards from those devices before you trust anything else with them.
Verdict from someone who has been burned
After a bunch of personal screwups and helping other people through theirs, Disk Drill has become the default suggestion I give to non-experts.
Not because it wins every checkbox war, but because:
• It keeps the first run simple enough for stressed-out people.
• The preview is good enough to avoid blind gambling.
• The camera video recovery is ahead of anything else I have tested with fragmented SD recordings.
• The imaging and S.M.A.R.T. pieces encourage safer workflows for failing drives.
• Recovery Vault gives you faster, cleaner undeletes in folders you care about.
If you are comparing tools, my advice is boring:
Install Disk Drill, run a free scan on the exact drive that is in trouble, preview what it finds, and see if it shows you the files you care about. Do the same with whatever other tool you are eyeing.
Every time I have watched someone repeat that experiment honestly, they tended to stick with Disk Drill for real recoveries.
7 Likes
Short answer for value: for most non‑expert users with work files on an external drive, Disk Drill is the better spend than EaseUS.
You already got the deep breakdown from @mikeappsreviewer, so I will not repeat all the workflow stuff. I will focus more on where Disk Drill vs EaseUS makes sense for money, outcomes, and your exact situation.
Quick comparison for your use case
External drive, important work files, you want to avoid wasting cash.
Pricing and what you get
Both have free scan, paid recovery.
EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard:
• Personal license is usually more expensive for lifetime than Disk Drill.
• On Windows the cheaper tiers often limit GB of recovery. Easy to hit that if you have a “big batch of work files”.
• Paid version works well with common “oops deleted” or “formatted drive” cases, less great when file system is a mess or the drive is getting flaky.
Disk Drill:
• One Pro license covers multiple recovery scenarios with no recovery size cap.
• One license works on both Windows and macOS, which saves money if you own both.
• You get extra tools baked in, like drive imaging and SMART monitoring, that you would need separate software for with EaseUS.
So dollar for dollar, Disk Drill gives you more long term value, not only a one‑time repair.
Recovery quality and folder structure
This is where I disagree slightly with some people who say “they are all the same under the hood”. I have seen different results.
EaseUS:
• Often does fine on simple delete or quick format.
• On RAW partitions or heavily damaged file systems, it tends to spit out big flat lists grouped by type.
• Folder structure from EaseUS is hit or miss. If you need full paths and project trees, that is important.
Disk Drill:
• More consistent at rebuilding real folder structure when the file system is still partially intact.
• Strong preview before you pay, so you see if the files you care about are there and open.
• The “recovery chance” scores are not perfect, but they save time, since you do not waste recovery on mostly dead files.
If your work files live in project folders, client folders, etc, structure matters. That pushes value to Disk Drill, because time spent re‑sorting ugly exports is also money.
Drive condition and safety
If your external drive is:
• Clicking.
• Slowing down a lot.
• Throwing I/O errors.
Then the safest workflow is: image first, scan the image.
EaseUS:
• Will read and scan the failing disk directly.
• Has no strong guided imaging flow meant for stressed home users.
• More risk of hammering an already weak drive and losing more surface.
Disk Drill:
• Has byte to byte image creation built in with a straightforward flow.
• Handles bad areas in stages, lets you pause, and gives you a clear visual map.
• After that, you scan the image, not the sick hardware.
If your drive shows any signs of dying, that imaging feature alone makes Disk Drill a better value. You avoid a lab bill later, which is far more than any software license.
Ease of use while stressed
You are in panic mode. Extra knobs are not a favor.
EaseUS:
• UI is not terrible, but it tends to lead you into multiple scan types and partitions.
• On big external drives, I have seen people run the wrong scan first, waste hours, and then need to re‑run.
Disk Drill:
• Starts with a clean device list. Big button, simple start.
• Runs its methods together, then merges results into a single view.
• Strong filters by type, size, date etc, so you go straight to “docs from last month on this drive”.
That simplicity is not fluff. It saves you failed attempts, which is where value gets lost.
Where EaseUS might still make sense
I would not say Disk Drill wins for every single person.
Consider EaseUS if:
• You already own an EaseUS license and your case is simple, like “deleted some files yesterday from the same drive you are running Windows on”.
• You work only on Windows, do not care about extra tools, and find a big discount deal.
• You only need to pull out a small amount of data and hit one of their cheaper, low‑GB tiers.
Even then, I would run the free scans from both and see which one shows more of what you need, with valid previews.
Practical steps for you right now
- Stop writing to that external drive. No copies, no installs on it.
- If the drive clicks or disconnects, do not keep trying to browse it in Explorer or Finder.
- Install Disk Drill to a different drive.
- Run a free scan of the problem disk.
- Check previews of the exact work files you need. If they open in preview and look correct, pay and recover to a different physical drive.
- If Disk Drill does not show what you need, test EaseUS free scan on the same drive, but do not recover to it.
If Disk Drill’s free scan shows your files with intact previews and reasonable “high” or “good” indicators, paying for Disk Drill is, in my opinion, better value than putting that same money into EaseUS.
Extra reading that helps compare
If you want one more Disk Drill review that focuses on real recovery results, check this detailed breakdown:
Is Disk Drill worth it for serious data recovery
That article takes a similar angle to what @mikeappsreviewer described, but from another user and with a bit more focus on pros and cons, not only the good parts.
Bottom line for value vs EaseUS in your situation
• Large batch of work files on an external drive.
• High stress, limited time.
• You do not want to buy twice.
Disk Drill is the safer first purchase. Better preview, better handling of problem drives, more complete toolkit, and no recovery size cap give you more for the money long term.
Short version: in your exact situation, Disk Drill is the better value 8 times out of 10, but there are a couple cases where EaseUS wins on cost.
I’ve used both on external drives, and I’ve also read through what @mikeappsreviewer and @techchizkid shared. I agree with them on Disk Drill’s workflow and scan quality, but here’s a slightly different angle so you don’t just get the same speech again.
1. Where Disk Drill actually beats EaseUS on value, not hype
a) Big batch of work files = no size limits matters
EaseUS loves to slap recovery caps on cheaper licenses (like 2 GB / small tiers). With a “big batch” of work stuff, you’ll blow through that in a blink, then you’re paying more or fighting limits.
Disk Drill Pro for Windows/macOS:
- No recovery size cap
- One license works across multiple drives and cases
- Same license works on both Windows and Mac
If you ever need to recover again (you probably will), that one-time buy is cheaper long term than playing “which EaseUS tier do I need this time?” every disaster.
b) Folder structure for projects
Work files usually live in a tree:
Client > Year > Project > Versions > Final
EaseUS can bring structure back, but in messy RAW / corrupted scenarios I’ve seen it spit out:
- Type-based buckets (DOC, XLS, etc)
- Tons of “lost files” with garbage names
Disk Drill is more consistent about:
- Rebuilding directory trees when any metadata survives
- Keeping project folder structure so you’re not hand-sorting a thousand “file000123.docx”
If your income depends on which file is which version in which folder, that time saved is literal money.
2. Where I slightly disagree with the Disk Drill praise
Both @mikeappsreviewer and @techchizkid lean pretty hard into Disk Drill as the no-brainer. I like it too, but:
- EaseUS is not “trash”
- In simple cases like:
- Recently deleted files
- No file system damage
- Healthy drive
EaseUS often recovers just fine and sometimes feels a bit more “Windows-native” UI-wise.
If your drive is totally healthy and you just Shift+Deleted a folder yesterday, and you catch a good discount on EaseUS with no dumb size limit, it can be the cheaper one-off fix.
For your external with a big batch gone, though, that’s usually not the simple case.
3. When EaseUS might actually be the smarter spend
Honestly I’d only put EaseUS ahead of Disk Drill if:
- You already own EaseUS from some bundle or old purchase,
- Your external drive:
- Mounts cleanly
- No weird delays or clicking
- Shows the partition fine, maybe you just formatted it or deleted stuff
- You only need to pull back a small amount of data and the size cap on their cheaper plan covers you.
If any of those are false, Disk Drill’s pricing model plus extra tooling tends to pull ahead.
4. The one part almost no one factors into “value”: drive health
This is where I think Disk Drill’s value is underrated compared to EaseUS.
- If your external is:
- Slow to open
- Randomly disconnecting
- Throwing I/O errors
you are in “could get worse” territory.
Disk Drill comes with:
- Byte to byte imaging that’s actually usable for non-nerds
- A decent S.M.A.R.T. view that translates “drive is dying” into English
That means:
- You clone the disk once
- Put the dying drive aside
- Do all your experiments on the image
EaseUS can scan a bad drive too, but it nudges you more toward “just run a scan directly,” which can kill a weak drive faster. One screwup like that costs you all your data, and then you’re in clean-room-lab-money territory. That destroys any “I saved 20 bucks on software” argument.
5. Where Disk Drill’s extras quietly add value
Not rehashing the whole feature parade, just the money-related parts:
-
Imaging + S.M.A.R.T. + recovery in one
No need to buy a separate imaging tool or SMART monitor. That’s actual cost saved. -
Recovery Vault / protection
You set it up once on your main machine and key folders (Documents, client folders), and future “oops, deleted” moments become trivial. That amortizes the price over future mistakes, not just today’s panic.
EaseUS is more “single job” oriented. Disk Drill acts more like “ok, you’re going to screw up again, let’s plan for that.”
6. For what you should literally do right now
Not repeating the full step-by-step everyone already wrote, just the value-focused part:
- Install nothing on the broken external.
- Install Disk Drill on another drive (internal or a different external).
- Run a free scan on the problem external.
- Look for:
- Your exact work folders
- Real previews of your important files opening correctly
- If you see them there, in structure, and they preview clean, Disk Drill is worth paying for.
- If Disk Drill finds basically nothing, then try EaseUS’s free scan for comparison. Don’t pay anything until one of them clearly shows your stuff with good previews.
Whichever tool shows more intact files with working previews on the free scan wins. Every time I’ve watched that “A/B test” honestly, Disk Drill wins on actual recovered result per dollar, especially on externals that got weird.
7. Extra resource if you want to understand what just happened
If you want a human-readable breakdown of what “data loss” actually is, what really gets wiped, and what recovery software is doing under the hood, this is worth a skim:
how data loss really happens and what you can still save
It’s a fast way to reset your expectations so you know when software can help and when no tool is going to resurrect ash.
If your work files are truly important and this isn’t just a “meh, old movies” situation, I’d personally put my money on Disk Drill first. In your specific “big batch on external drive” scenario, factoring in safety, folder structure, no size cap, and extra tools, Disk Drill is simply the better value proposition than EaseUS.
Short version: for a “big batch of work files on an external,” Disk Drill is usually the better value than EaseUS, mainly because of how it handles messy cases and how you actually work with the results.
I’ll skip the how‑to, since @techchizkid and @mikeappsreviewer already walked through the panic workflow in detail. Instead, here’s a value / tradeoff breakdown that slots beside what they wrote.
How they differ when your drive is in real trouble
What @mikeappsreviewer described matches what I keep seeing in practice:
EaseUS is fine when:
- The drive is healthy
- You just deleted / formatted recently
- You mostly care about “get some files back,” not perfect structure
Where things tilt heavily toward Disk Drill:
- External suddenly shows as RAW
- File system is damaged
- You need original project structure, not a dump of file fragments
- You do not want to play guessing games with scan modes
EaseUS can recover in RAW situations, but it more often turns into big type-based buckets and “lost files” with generic names. That is a nightmare for client work where folder hierarchy and filenames matter.
Disk Drill, like they mentioned, tends to reconstruct:
- Folder trees when there is any metadata left
- Grouped results you can filter and preview in a sane way
That middle step between “scan finished” and “hit Recover” is where value shows up. Less time sorting junk is actual money saved if this is work data.
Pros of Disk Drill for your exact use case
1. Better fit for panic mode
You are not trying to tune forensic parameters. You are trying not to wreck what is left. Disk Drill keeps the “first run” closer to:
- Pick disk
- Hit scan
- Start previewing
That lines up with what @techchizkid liked about it: fewer landmines for non‑pros.
2. Strong previews and realistic success scores
You see if a file actually opens before you pay or commit. That is key. EaseUS also previews, but Disk Drill’s previews and “recovery chances” labels are more honest in ugly cases. Less blind 500 GB recovery, more “only save what looks clean.”
3. Project structure & big jobs
No artificial size caps means your whole external project set is in play, not just 2 GB of “trial” space. For a lot of work datasets, that alone makes Disk Drill cheaper in real terms than EaseUS’s tiered / capped plans.
4. Bonus tools that reduce risk cost
This is underplayed in other replies:
- Byte‑to‑byte imaging that a non‑expert can actually use
- S.M.A.R.T. status that is understandable
If your external is even slightly flaky, imaging first then scanning the image is the “don’t lose everything” move. Having that inside the same tool is practical value, not a checkbox.
5. Camera / SD card logic
If any of those “work files” involve camera or drone footage, Advanced Camera Recovery is a big deal. A lot of cheaper or older tools carve video in fragments that technically “recover” but are useless. Disk Drill is better at reconstructing long clips in the right order, which lines up with what @mikeappsreviewer described.
Cons of Disk Drill you should actually factor in
Not magic, and not the only rational choice:
-
No native Linux app
If you live in Linux and want to stay there, Disk Drill is awkward. You’d have to image there and scan from Windows or macOS. -
Overkill for tiny, simple mistakes
If you only nuked a small folder yesterday on a perfectly healthy drive, paying for Disk Drill might be more tool than you needed. EaseUS on a discount can sometimes be cheaper for a one‑off 500 MB “oops.” -
Not a full lab-grade RAID tool
For complex RAID recovery or very niche setups, you would look elsewhere. That is beyond what you are describing, but it is still a limitation. -
Paid to actually recover
Like EaseUS, the real recovery is behind a paywall. The scan and preview are free, but some people expect free full recovery and feel burned. If you want truly free full recovery, neither of these is ideal.
EaseUS vs Disk Drill in value terms
Where I slightly disagree with the others: EaseUS is not useless, and in very basic, non‑RAW scenarios it can be “good enough” and occasionally cheaper, especially if you catch a promo or already own a license.
But for your specific case:
- External drive
- Big batch of work files
- Reviews “all over the place” because people’s situations differ
the balance usually looks like:
-
EaseUS
- Better if: drive is healthy, deletion/format was recent, total data is small, and you get a cheap tier with no awkward cap for your size.
- Worse if: the file system is messed up, you care about structure, or you are near/over size limits.
-
Disk Drill
- Better if: things look ugly (RAW, weird errors), you have a lot of data, or you want tools that also help future disasters (Recovery Vault, S.M.A.R.T., imaging).
- Slightly worse if: this is a one‑time, tiny recovery on a perfectly behaving drive and you only care about a couple of files.
Given what @mikeappsreviewer and @cazadordeestrellas have described from real failures, and your “big batch on external” detail, Disk Drill is very likely the higher value spend once you include time, risk, and future mishaps.
What I would actually do before paying
Even if you are leaning Disk Drill (and I think you should):
- Install Disk Drill on a different disk.
- Run a free scan on the broken external.
- Check if it shows:
- Your real folder tree
- Correct filenames
- Clean previews of your important files
If it does, it just justified its price.
Only if Disk Drill finds almost nothing or previews look broken would I bother running an EaseUS free scan as a second opinion. Whichever one shows more intact, previewable files wins your money.
In most cases matching what you described, that ends up being Disk Drill.