Stellar Windows Data Recovery review

Pros Recovers 185 different file types from dozens of storage media. Recovers emails & attachments. Recovers files from corrupted and formatted drives. Recovers deleted partitions. Shows your drive’s health. Previews files before recovery.

Cons No text search.

Verdict If you need to recover lost files, this is the best tool for the job.

Likes

Recovers lost files from lots of storage media — As well as recovering more than 185 different file types, it also recovers deleted files from loads of storage media. Stuff like hard drives, CDs, DVDs, flash USB drives, and memory cards.

The Deep Scan searches every last byte — If the Quick Scan doesn’t find the files you’re looking for, then the Deep Scan will. It searches every cluster for lost, deleted, and formatted data on your drives. (This obviously takes a while, though.)

Recovers files from phones & cameras — It will recover data, photos and videos from your mobile phone… even if you’ve deleted the files or formatted your phone’s memory card. It also supports all major camera file formats so you can do raw recovery.

Recovers emails and attachments — It supports Microsoft Outlook (PST) files, and Outlook Express (DBX files).

Recovers files from corrupted drives — If your drive is badly corrupted, or has lots of bad sectors, it can create an image of the drive. You can often get better results from an image, and recovery is faster.

Recovers files from formatted drives — If your hard drive has become so corrupted that your only option is to format the drive (due to a severe virus attack, for example), Stellar Windows Data Recovery can still recover your files.

Recovers deleted partitions — If you accidentally delete a partition… no problem. Because Stellar Windows Data Recovery will find and recover your deleted partition.

Shows you the health of your drives — It scans and monitors your drives using Self Monitoring Analysis Reporting Technology. This shows you the status of your drives, and lets you know about any impending physical issues.

You can preview files before recovery — You can click any recoverable file to get a preview of that file. (Some severely corrupted files will look like gobbledygook, though). You can also sort results by name, type, size, modified date, created date, last access date, or file ID.

Dislikes

No text search — You can scan by type, file size, or date etc., but you can’t search for files by name or by text within a file (for example, a Word document).

Bottom line

If you need to recover files because you’ve deleted them, or because of a corrupt or formatted drive, then Stellar Windows Data Recovery is your best bet at recovering them.