Excellent article and comparison. Super helpful. This is one I’ll be passing along to family and friends.
bill
12 years ago
excellent!!
a professional comparison with informative results—extra effort made to allow for possible unfair comparison—-will be sending to my tech savv friends
Alexa
12 years ago
This was a very good article to read. When you restored the files from the PC Inspecter File Recovery were you able to scroll through all of your files? I have found that this program works very well, the search is the only things that freezes. And then the whole scrolling through the files. Feel kind of silly that I can’t figure it out, there is no scroll bar on the side, and when there is you still can’t scroll through all the files.
That program was full of bugs when we tested it and we recommend you to try another, that has less usability issues.
Gregory Santana
11 years ago
Thank you for a great comparison. I was Recuva a long time ago and your testing should I selected the right one.
Super job, again, Thank you
jmjsquared
8 years ago
This type of comparison has limited usefulness, IMO. Since it is of a serious emergency-type of software, I’d prefer its scope not to be limited only to free products. I’d like to know your opinion as to the BEST means of recovering my data — free or paid– and then to decide for myself if any cost is justified.
If you were drowning, you would not insist on only free life preservers being thrown to you, would you?
You are right about the best tools for recovering data. But that would make another article.
This comparison states right from the beginning (title) that it’s only about free products.
I noted your opinion and we’ll try to get back as soon as possible with a “Best Tools For Recovering Data (Commercial Or Not)” comparison.
Thanks for the super-fast reply. I’ll eagerly be looking for any such review as, right now for instance, I really could use it! I have a 750 GB Seagate HDD from which two partitions “magically” disappeared. Much of the huge amount of time I’ve spent unsuccessfully using various paid and free recovery tools could have been saved — partially at least– if I could have relied on a definitive, side-by-side comparison like you made of these five, free products.
It seems that sites like yours shy away from reviewing/comparing commercial products, perhaps to avoid the appearance of being biased for monetary reasons(?)
Anyway, I’ll ‘stay tuned’ just in case you do do such a review. 🙂
I guess the tutorial website are limited to suggesting free tools for the shake of home users that can’t afford or wants to invest in paid software.
There are other places on the web where you can find and compare list of paid recovery applications. You can use whichever you want depending upon your interest.
Below are the three popular software I’d recommend you to give a shot and see if you’d able to recover anything:
1. R-Studio
2. Stellar Phoenix
3. GetDataBack
Good luck!!
Mango
8 years ago
You list Recuva and Puran as being the “clear” winners, but when you take out the files it recovered but were corrupt, it looks to be a more even playing field with Disk Drill. Take Disk Drills shorter time to recover and it almost becomes even.
mk
5 years ago
I deleted some photos on my camera and transfered them to my phone. Few hours later, the worst thing happened and I lost my phone. I was wondering if I use Image Rescue by Lexar which can only recover 3 photos then use Recuva to recover other photos. Would it corrupt/override the other photos to be recovered? or Should I just stick to Recuva to recover more photos?
You can use what software you wish. You should only recover them to a different partition or hard disk than the one were they were placed initially.
Kristi
5 years ago
OKay so my computer won’t start, it only goes to recovery options. If I download recuva, how do I use it when I can’t get to windows? And where do I save the file? These are the questions (I think) most people want to know.
For example, I just downloaded recuva, but was given no option to download it to my thumb stick. It just downloaded right to my other computers hard drive.
This would actually entail a whole other article outside the scope of this article. There are different ways to recover data in your situation, but I’ll give you the run down on how I do it using an adapter or dock.
You would need to take the hard drive out of the computer and use an adapter or docking unit to mount the hard drive to a different, functioning computer. The adapter or docking unit essentially makes the hard drive function like a thumb drive where you just plug it into another computer’s USB port. Then you can run Recuva on the functioning computer and attempt to recover data. ** You may actually not even need Recuva since you may be able to get to your files after mounting the hard drive.
It’s not clear from the article whether the procedure (delete files, add some new ones) was repeated for every test, or if the test memory stick was produced once, then cloned as-is. If it was made anew every time, the actual recoverability of the files would vary from one instance to the next, thus not being a repeatable test of the programs tested.
DonaldWetzel
3 years ago
I think that the evaluation method could be improved significantly. I’m sure time and effort is a big factor in this but it would have added so much more value to the results. You should have had at ten trials (25 trials is the cutoff for the minimal requirements for scientific experiements) and the erasure of different program extensions. You should also had different methods of erasures like some files that were deleted with different method. Why can’t software review articles conduct experiments more like this. It would probably only take a few more hours but reveal so much more.
Because the time it takes to write one article would increase exponentially, and no publication can afford to spend days writing just one article.
jasonwillm
3 years ago
Hi, I used Recuva data recovery software It’s work well as compare any other free tool. In Paid Tool Stellar Photo Recovery is best files recovery tool which recover deleted photos, video, audio, and many more!
Excellent article and comparison. Super helpful. This is one I’ll be passing along to family and friends.
excellent!!
a professional comparison with informative results—extra effort made to allow for possible unfair comparison—-will be sending to my tech savv friends
This was a very good article to read. When you restored the files from the PC Inspecter File Recovery were you able to scroll through all of your files? I have found that this program works very well, the search is the only things that freezes. And then the whole scrolling through the files. Feel kind of silly that I can’t figure it out, there is no scroll bar on the side, and when there is you still can’t scroll through all the files.
That program was full of bugs when we tested it and we recommend you to try another, that has less usability issues.
Thank you for a great comparison. I was Recuva a long time ago and your testing should I selected the right one.
Super job, again, Thank you
This type of comparison has limited usefulness, IMO. Since it is of a serious emergency-type of software, I’d prefer its scope not to be limited only to free products. I’d like to know your opinion as to the BEST means of recovering my data — free or paid– and then to decide for myself if any cost is justified.
If you were drowning, you would not insist on only free life preservers being thrown to you, would you?
You are right about the best tools for recovering data. But that would make another article.
This comparison states right from the beginning (title) that it’s only about free products.
I noted your opinion and we’ll try to get back as soon as possible with a “Best Tools For Recovering Data (Commercial Or Not)” comparison.
Thanks for the super-fast reply. I’ll eagerly be looking for any such review as, right now for instance, I really could use it! I have a 750 GB Seagate HDD from which two partitions “magically” disappeared. Much of the huge amount of time I’ve spent unsuccessfully using various paid and free recovery tools could have been saved — partially at least– if I could have relied on a definitive, side-by-side comparison like you made of these five, free products.
It seems that sites like yours shy away from reviewing/comparing commercial products, perhaps to avoid the appearance of being biased for monetary reasons(?)
Anyway, I’ll ‘stay tuned’ just in case you do do such a review. 🙂
Regards.
Hi Jmj,
I guess the tutorial website are limited to suggesting free tools for the shake of home users that can’t afford or wants to invest in paid software.
There are other places on the web where you can find and compare list of paid recovery applications. You can use whichever you want depending upon your interest.
Below are the three popular software I’d recommend you to give a shot and see if you’d able to recover anything:
1. R-Studio
2. Stellar Phoenix
3. GetDataBack
Good luck!!
You list Recuva and Puran as being the “clear” winners, but when you take out the files it recovered but were corrupt, it looks to be a more even playing field with Disk Drill. Take Disk Drills shorter time to recover and it almost becomes even.
I deleted some photos on my camera and transfered them to my phone. Few hours later, the worst thing happened and I lost my phone. I was wondering if I use Image Rescue by Lexar which can only recover 3 photos then use Recuva to recover other photos. Would it corrupt/override the other photos to be recovered? or Should I just stick to Recuva to recover more photos?
You can use what software you wish. You should only recover them to a different partition or hard disk than the one were they were placed initially.
OKay so my computer won’t start, it only goes to recovery options. If I download recuva, how do I use it when I can’t get to windows? And where do I save the file? These are the questions (I think) most people want to know.
For example, I just downloaded recuva, but was given no option to download it to my thumb stick. It just downloaded right to my other computers hard drive.
Hi Kristi,
This would actually entail a whole other article outside the scope of this article. There are different ways to recover data in your situation, but I’ll give you the run down on how I do it using an adapter or dock.
You would need to take the hard drive out of the computer and use an adapter or docking unit to mount the hard drive to a different, functioning computer. The adapter or docking unit essentially makes the hard drive function like a thumb drive where you just plug it into another computer’s USB port. Then you can run Recuva on the functioning computer and attempt to recover data. ** You may actually not even need Recuva since you may be able to get to your files after mounting the hard drive.
Here’s a great article on how to mount your hard drive to another computer: https://www.howtogeek.com/182452/how-to-get-data-off-an-old-hard-drive-without-putting-it-in-a-pc/
Adapters/Docks: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=hard+drive+dock&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Ahard+drive+dock
It’s not clear from the article whether the procedure (delete files, add some new ones) was repeated for every test, or if the test memory stick was produced once, then cloned as-is. If it was made anew every time, the actual recoverability of the files would vary from one instance to the next, thus not being a repeatable test of the programs tested.
I think that the evaluation method could be improved significantly. I’m sure time and effort is a big factor in this but it would have added so much more value to the results. You should have had at ten trials (25 trials is the cutoff for the minimal requirements for scientific experiements) and the erasure of different program extensions. You should also had different methods of erasures like some files that were deleted with different method. Why can’t software review articles conduct experiments more like this. It would probably only take a few more hours but reveal so much more.
Oh well.
Because the time it takes to write one article would increase exponentially, and no publication can afford to spend days writing just one article.
Hi, I used Recuva data recovery software It’s work well as compare any other free tool. In Paid Tool Stellar Photo Recovery is best files recovery tool which recover deleted photos, video, audio, and many more!