These days every picture you take or every document you create ends up stored on your device and as such that storage disk becomes incredibly valuable. Yet as you may have already experienced, hard drives can go belly up and lose all those important files; fortunately data recovery software such as CleverFiles' Disk Drill or Stellar Mac Data Recovery are lifesaving solutions in such situations. Best of all, they are free to download and test to see whether it is possible to restore the data from a failed hard drive. But it’s better to start this process with a little education first, so which of these two tools is the one for you?
Stellar Phoenix is recently renamed as Stellar Data Recovery If you are looking for a complete data recovery solution for your Microsoft Windows operating systems or your Apple devices, as your Mac, iPad or iPhone, then Stellar Phoenix Software is the true choice. Mar 29, 2017 Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery software is a well-known name in the field of data recovery. It claims to perform various Mac recovery tasks and help you get you lost data. Dec 13, 2018 Stellar Photo Recovery is the best photo recovery software out there, combining exceptional ease of use with strong overall performance. Aside from a slow recovery speed and less-than-perfect product and raw format recovery, its recovery rates for every other image type were perfect.
Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Mac software is your answer to seamlessly recover all your lost and deleted Mac data. Owing to its user-friendly interface, recovering data from Mac machine. Stellar Data Recovery scanned the drive, found the corrupted partition, and identified all the missing files that I could think of. It also has a preview ability so I could tell that my photos were OK instead of garbled. At this point to recover I had to pay to activate the software, and I chose the least expensive 1-year subscription option. Stellar Data Recovery Professional v10.0 has powerful capabilities for restoring lost data in vast scenarios, ranging from accidental deletion to lost or corrupt partition and drive formatting. The software restores data from crashed Mac, offering you peace of mind in tough situations when you’re unable to boot and access the Mac startup volume.
Disk Drill
Developed by U.S.-based company 508 Software, Disk Drill provides an easy way to get started thanks to the clean, user-friendly GUI. The basic options for quick or deep scans is topped by additional features such as iOS data recovery.
While the speed of quick search is mostly on a par with Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery's, the deep scan takes a good deal of time; depending on the storage capacity of the connected hard drive it could take tens of hours to finish. But when the scan is done, it's very easy to identify the lost files using the filters included in the software alongside the search field and Quick Look features.
Connected DisksSystem Integrity ProtectionHDD ScanningGuaranteed RecoveryData RecoveryFile Preview
macOS System Integrity ProtectionDisk Drill Guaranteed RecoveryBig Thumbnail Preview
CleverFiles' Disk Drill is free to download and test, and users need only upgrade to the Pro version if they find the recoverable files they’re looking for, which is why the company doesn't offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. For the $89 Pro license users can use it on three Mac computers, however. And if you are stuck with an issue and the site's help section doesn't provide enough info, then it’s possible to reach out to support via live chat or email to get answers fairly quickly.
Stellar Mac Data Recovery
With more than 25 years of experience, India-based Stellar Info packs all the features you might need into its Stellar Mac Data Recovery software, healing the wounds caused by mishaps such as data corruption, accidental deletion, and unwanted disk formatting. Users have the option of selecting the file type that they are looking for before the scan so they don't have to go through all of the data that Stellar Phoenix has found.
Data Recovery's feature set is limited when compared to Disk Drill's and it is able to identify fewer file types (190 and growing, but the latter is able to recover more than 200 types). Speed-wise, Stellar's quick search is on par with Disk Drill's but cannot beat it in a deep scan. In our tests, a deep scan of a 2TB external drive took 19 hours for Stellar and 16 for Disk Drill. To prevent against future data loss the latter includes a feature called Guaranteed Recovery, which we would like to see in Stellar’s software as well.
Launch WindowGraphical User InterfaceScanning 129 HoursData PreviewScan BugScan Completed
Stellar Mac Data Recovery Scan OptionsData Preview While Scanning the Drive![]() Scan Completed
Searching through the results is a little sluggish, too, so it's easier to narrow down the results by data type and make good use of the preview option, which still works fine while scanning the hard drive. The free version is limited to scanning but the $79 yearly subscription will unlock data recovery.
Conclusion
Considering how the data recovery feature sets of both tools are almost a match, what makes the difference when it comes to making a decision are the tiny details. In this case the file types or file signatures that a certain application is able to identify and remap is important, which is where Disk Drill is slightly ahead. But while it does stand out for its simple and clean interface, it lacks the greater search customization with which Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery helps users to get started.
It depends on the user's personal preference when comparing the two pricing schemes, though: while Disk Drill’s $89 fee for three Macs represents a good deal, it is still necessary to purchase a new license each time a major update is released. Compared to that, Stellar's $79 subscription means the latest version of the app is accessible as soon as it is available to the public.
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Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery
Editor Rating: Fair (2.5)
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Buy It Now
With data recovery software, your deleted or scrambled files are at stake, so you need to be careful about which app you choose. Stellar Data Recovery Premium, like our Editors' Choice pick, EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard, lets you use a free trial version to see which files it can recover, before requiring you to pay for the full restore features. If you understand its limits and maintain reasonable expectations, Stellar Data Recovery Premium does a good job of bringing back files. Unfortunately, however, these apps sometimes can't recover everything they claim. We can't give Stellar Data's latest version a strong recommendation because of its inconsistent recovery reporting and poor usability across multiple monitors, problems that suggest that this new version needs further testing and refinement by the vendor.
Stellar Data Recovery Professional sells for $79.95, but before you buy, you can use a free trial version to get a fairly clear idea of whether it will recover your files. Windows and Mac versions are sold at the same price, but we tested only the Windows version. Getting Started
Even though vast numbers of business and home users have been using multi-monitor systems for years, Stellar Data Recovery does not work well with this type of setup. On my two-monitor system, the left half of the Stellar app's window appeared in my left-hand monitor and the right half of the window in the right-hand monitor, with the two monitors' bezels splitting the app's window down the middle. I've never seen this behavior in commercial software.
When I tried to drag the window into one of the monitors, the app kept dividing itself back between the two windows every time I clicked a button or performed any other action. While this problem doesn't affect the app's ability to recover files, it doesn't inspire confidence in the app or the vendor. Even when I updated the app to the latest version, the problem persisted. Keep in mind, when reading the rest of this review, that I had to keep dragging the app's window into one of my two monitors at every single step in its operation.
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Testing Setup
I have two hard drives in my desktop system: an SSD and a spinning-platter disk. This setup is a common configuration for business machines, where the fast-performing SSD is used for the operating system and apps, and the slower spinning-platter disk is used for storing documents. Keep in mind that>
I first tested Stellar Data Recovery by deleting some PNG files from my spinning-platter disk, emptying the Recycle Bin, and asking the app to recover the files. It quickly scanned the disk, found the deleted PNG files, and displayed accurate thumbnail previews of most of them. In general, if you can see the preview image, you can be confident that the paid version of the app can recover the file. However, if you don't see a preview image of the files you want or if the preview isn't exactly what you expect, be very cautious, because it's unlikely that the app can recover anything it can't preview. Unfortunately, neither Stellar nor EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Pro can preview ZIP archives by listing the files contained in them, so you'll have to tell the app to try to recover those files before you can know whether recovery is possible.
When I tested Stellar Data Recovery on an SSD, it performed a deep scan that took nearly an hour, and reported that 17.3 GB of data was recoverable. I have strong doubts about that number because the app couldn't even display preview images of most of the files that I checked, meaning that recovery was likely impossible as well. The program also sometimes displayed previews that obviously didn't match the filenames. For example, almost every HTML file that Stellar claimed to find was actually a fragment of some other file that wasn't in HTML format at all. Fortunately, the app's preview pane made it obvious that the files weren't the HTML files that Stellar claimed they were.
Features and Drawbacks
Unlike the EaseUS app, Stellar doesn't automatically display separate lists of deleted file and other files. If you want to see only the deleted files that Stellar found on your disk, you'll have to click on a 'Deleted' tab—and then wait for the app to sort the file list. This process can take a surprisingly long time—more than an hour when I tested the app with an SSD, and that was after it took even longer to scan the drive in the first place. This separate sorting step for deleted files seems like a puzzling design choice, when you probably chose the app for the sole purpose of finding deleted files. What made this even more frustrating in my tests was that the progress bar showed that the deleted-file sorting was half complete before reverting to the starting position, so I never could be sure of how much of the job was done.
Another frustration in Stellar's app involves its option to save recovery data for use after you restart the app. Whenever I tried to use the saved recovery data, Stellar continued scanning the drive I was working with, taking as long as two hours to complete the scan. In contrast, EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard loaded the saved data and immediately let me get back to work recovering data. Stellar also showed intermittent problems when I tried to stop a scan before it was finished. Most of the time, I could stop the scan easily, but on two tries, the app refused to stop the scan and I had to shut it down from the Windows Task Manager. EaseUS never showed any similar problem.
Stellar includes a disk monitoring and cloning menu, something that EaseUS doesn't, which displays the SMART status and other details about your current disk. This interface also includes a disk-scanning feature, though you probably shouldn't use it with an SSD, since it may inflict needless wear-and-tear. The same menu lets you clone a disk to another drive, which is useful for when you want to get a copy of a failing drive before it deteriorates further. EaseUS offers a separate EaseUS Todo Backup app that includes cloning and multiple alternative backup features.
Less Than StellarMac Data Recovery Software Download
Stellar Data Recovery was frustrating to work with even when it successfully restored lost files, but I wouldn't count this product out for good. An earlier version I tested a few years ago seemed much more reliable, so maybe Stellar will improve performance and reliability in future versions. All data recovery apps are imperfect, but EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard seems much less imperfect, and it's the data recovery app that we recommend.
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