In today’s time, information is power, and to keep it intact and safe, we must take respective measures, but sometimes, things go the other way around and we end up losing our valuable data. The next thing which comes to our mind is how to recover it anyhow and that’s when you think of 2 options i.e. do the data recovery by yourself using recovery software or take it to a local data recovery guy. Honestly, I’ve tried the 2nd option two times, but it never worked. That’s when I realized that the only reliable option is to recover the data by yourself using a reliable software because that’s what same local repair guys do, except they’re not updated with the latest software’s available. So, after doing research on various software’s available online, this software by Stellar I found most reliable and upon testing the free version, it didn’t let me down rather it helped me recover most of the deleted data, which was fantastic as with home/professional version, it doesn’t have any limits of data recovery size.
Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery v7 – Professional Version Review
Stellar Phoenix Windows data recovery software (professional version) is a desktop application which not only help in recovering data efficiently, but it also helps in creating full backups of your drives to save yourself for future mishaps. This software is capable of recovering almost any kind of data from hard drives, CD/DVD, SD cards, USB drives or even lost or inaccessible hard drive partitions. That’s not all, the software also gives you the option to search & recover lost data inside any particular folder too.
Product Functionalities of Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery
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Easy to use Interface
With V7 update, Stellar has updated the user interface of the software with easy to use options. The software is now more intuitive and offers more options than before like selecting the desired type of files from a particular location for recovery, which ultimately saves a lot of time compared to scanning the whole hard disk for lost data.
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Deep Scan
Deep scan performs an extensive scan of any specified location or the complete drive to recover more data which if, in case you were not able to find or recover in a quick scan. This scan can take hours to complete depending upon how much space you’re scanning and the Deep Scan is even able to recover raw data. Using this feature, you can increase your data recovery chances by 5 folds. Unlike previous versions, this option is now available directly, means a user doesn’t need to run a primary scan first to get the option of the deep scan.
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Lost Partition Recovery
If in case, your whole partition goes missing, the software can help you recover it using “Can’t Find Drive” option available under “Other Locations”. This option appears after you select which kind of file you’re looking to recover. Upon selecting this option, the software scan the hard drive for missing partitions which you might have lost it because of corruption or got accidentally deleted. Once the software finds required partition, you can recover almost all the data from it easily.
This feature also offers deep scan to recover lost partitions. Upon doing a quick search, if you can’t find the desired partition, use “Deep Scan” to find it and once found, start the data recovery process in it.
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Recovery from Disk Images
In case if your hard disk has the bad sectors, then also this software can help you in recovering data. All you need to take a full image backup of that drive and then use that image to recover data. A user needs to click “Recover from Disk Images”, create a new image and use that image to recover data from it.
Upon selecting above stated option, the user needs to select a particular drive to create an image or the user can select the whole hard disk for same. For advanced users, the software also offers to select Start and Ending sectors to create an image from for data recovery.
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Add New/Custom File Types
Although the software supports over 200+ file extensions to recover, you can add your custom file extension in software settings to recover those files too. All you need to open Settings > Add header and fill in details for the required file extension. Natively, the software supports all major common file extensions as shown below:
| Audio Video Files RMI, WAV, WMV, MPG, WMV, WMA, MP3, AVI, ASF, MPEG | Image Files BMP, WBMP, WMF, EMF, JPEG, JPG, JP2, PNG, MNG, DIB, GIF, TIF, TIFF, PNM etc. | Database Files MDF, DBF, CSV etc. | Internet files HTM, HTML, SHTML, SHTM, MHTML, XHTML, XHT, PLG etc. | Office Documents DOC, DOT, DOCX, DOTX, XLS, XLSX, XLTX, PPT, PPS, POT, PPTX etc. |
| Archive Files ARJ, LZH, ALZ, TAR, ZIP, RAR, CAB etc. | Miscellaneous Files C, PRG, TEXT, CXX, HPP, XML, CC, HH, ASM, JS, PHP, ASP, LIC, DEF etc. | Backup Files BKF | Acrobat Files |
Trial Data Recovery Results
Upon trying the software, I was really amazed by the amount of data software showed it is capable of recover. I remember few files which were deleted months back and the software was able to recover them those too. Here’s some screenshots I captured during and after the data recovery:
Upon recovering a sample data around 2 GB, most of the files were usable for future use. It’s only a few very big size zip archives which didn’t open upon recovering which is a very usual case with all data recovery software’s, so that’s not an issue. I was able to recover a .pst (email archive) file in a usable condition which is good. Overall my experience with the data recovery using this software is way better than Software’s I’ve used in the past.
Features of Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery
- Data Recovery: It can recover over 200+ file formats including files, folder, documents, photos, videos etc. You can also add new file formats for data recovery, through the ‘Add New File Type’ feature, thereby creating unlimited possibilities or number of files it can recover.
- Automatic storage detection: It can automatically detect newly added external storage on the fly like external hard drives, USB drives when connected.
- File Tree View: It can easily locate and show the recovered data either by file type, extension or by location.
- You can view your files during scan progress. There is an option to turn on/off this feature.
- It can help you in recovering usable deleted PST files.
- It can help you create a replica of your entire drive or partition. This feature helps, if in case your drive has bad sectors, you can recover data from the created image.
- You can use this software to recover data even from large drives say above 5 TB.
- The software is capable of switching to deep scan automatically in case if it detects that primary scan isn’t delivering satisfactory results. This helps in recovering data in case of severe corruption.
- Since the last version, latest version V7 offers an improved search engine to locate lost partitions with up to 40% better results. Also, there is an improvement in recovering more accurately FAT, NTFS, exFAT partitions with no duplicity. Also, the software is able to recover accidentally deleted files, even if those were deleted from Recycle Bin.
- There are dedicated options for office documents or folder recovery.
- You can select a location in a drive for data recovery, hence saving a lot of time by not searching the whole drive.
- You can stop and continue deep scan if required.
- There is also an option to resume recovery later on if needed. You can save the recovery information in a file generated by the software and upon importing that next time, you can resume the recovery process.
Also read: Stellar Launches BitRaser, A New Data Erasure Software On World Environment Day
Final Verdict
Till now, I’ve used many software’s of data recovery but this one is by far the best of all. It’s amusing and scary both at a time after knowing the amount of data it can recover even if the data was deleted long back. It offers an easy to use interface and doesn’t take much time in case if you’re recovering data from a particular location. Deep scan takes time, even many hours depending on the drive size, but the results are quite satisfactory. For most users, Home version (priced at $59.99) is suitable but in case if you’ve advanced requirement like CD/DVD recovery, creating an image of drive or partition and more, then buying professional version (Priced at $99) of the software is recommended. Also, you can use the free version of the software if the data lost size is less than 1 GB.
