Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery 3.0
$99
Stellar Information Systems
www.stellarinfo.com/partition-recovery.htm
CPUs: 4

Though you’ll always hear us admonish you all to back up regularly, even the most religious “backer-uppers” sometimes need to retrieve data from unreadable hard drives, floppies, CDs, and various flash-based media. In these cases, Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is a virtually indispensable tool to retrieve the otherwise irretrievable, provided the underlying hardware is (mostly) working properly.

The ideal recovery situation for SPWDR is when a file is lost due to software reasons, such as an accidental erasure or emptying of the trash, file deletions due to viruses or malware, or accidentally reformatting a drive or partition. In these cases, SPWDR manually scans the “empty” areas of a drive looking for fragments of files, which it then reconstructs on its own. If you know the file extension or part of the filename you want recovered, SPWDR can go digging with two scanning methods—otherwise, it just scans the drive and lists everything it can recover. In the case of an older, often reformatted drive, it successfully recovered files we haven’t thought of in years.

SPWDR is also handy for recovering files (such as digital photos) from flash drives or memory cards that appear as unformatted volumes in Windows. It successfully recovered hundreds of photos from an “unreadable” SD card from a digital camera in our tests, for example, along with a QuickTime movie file.

Damaged hard drives can be tricky, as the act of recovering data can push a finicky drive into total failure. Fortunately, SPWDR can take a complete image of such drives with just one or two passes and then attempt to recover data from the image file instead of the original drive. If you’ve ever frozen a drive and found you could only read from it when it was cold, working with an image can be a lifesaver.

The only strike against SPWDR is its clunky interface, which had me constantly referring to the Help file to see what different options did or what buttons to click, even after repeated usage. As with most software of this nature, you can try the software to see what it can recover before buying it, but you must purchase it before it actually retrieves any data.

by Warren Ernst