Data Recovery Digest

Data loss is less about ‘if’ and more about ‘when’. The chances are that the majority of us will experience some sort of data loss during our life. Whether it’s a small accidental deletion or a huge drive outage, no system is ever going to provide a fool-proof way of storing your data. Of course, we can mitigate this by backing up our data. However, many still don’t back their data up, which is precisely why there’s a market for data recovery tools.

One such tool is Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery, a piece of software that costs $49 for the standard edition and $99 for the Pro version.

Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery is a program that will scan your drive and attempt to recover data. Programs like this work because when data is removed it’s essentially just hidden and that space is marked as free. However, the data won’t be fully written over until something else is assigned its place. This is a random process, thus the user has no control over it. As such, it can still be possible to recover data that has been deleted weeks or months ago, depending on the usage of the drive.

This program is capable of recovering data from all sorts of formats, like hard drives, memory cards and discs. However, optical recovery is only available in the Pro edition of the program. The advanced version also adds in the ability to create system images and recover from Outlook .pst files.

The program has a bright and easy-to-use interface, which is especially helpful when you’re undergoing the stressful process of data loss. We did a full comparison of some of the most popular recovery tools and took a look at Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery.

Although we praised the fact the program had good localisation support and was able to handle strange file and folder names, it didn’t perform that well when it came to the actual recovery of data. It completely failed one of our tests and offered the weakest performance when compared against the competitors like Restorer Ultimate and R-Undelete.

In their review, PCWorld also found similar results. They noted that the program did quite well on two hard drives they tested with, although struggled with some headers in video files. However, when it came to a flash drive Stellar only managed one recoverable file, compared to R-Studio which had hundreds.

Data recovery programs do vary, which is why it’s always important to do your research. For more information on Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery, be sure to visit the official website. Here you will not only be able to purchase the program, but also download a free trial copy. It’s always worth downloading a trial so that you can get a feel for a program and seeing whether it’s worth your money.

Ultimately, although Stellar Phoenix doesn’t earn a resounding recommendation, it’s always worth checking out different recovery software to see which will give you the best return. Just remember to take an image of your drive and attempt recovery on that, otherwise if things are damaged further then there’s no going back to the original.