2017-03-08

Who doesn’t use a computer? And in this digital age a life without it is just impossible.

We store our most important files, songs, movies etc. on our storage media, such as in internal or external HDDs, SSDs, USB flash drives or, memory cards etc. it may be CDs or DVDs.

If there is a failure in operating system, malfunction of a storage device- logical or physical, accidental damage or deletion all lead to loss of our data.

So, we need a good data recovery software to retrieve those lost data. In our market, there are so many data recovery software but we need the most user friendly, most dependable application for this purpose.

Very recently I have used Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Home edition, Version 7.0 It is the latest version which was launched only in last month i.e. in February, 2017. The software language is available in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish. It supports Windows 10, 8.1, 8, 7, Vista & XP-which means it is covering a huge range of Microsoft Windows OS. It requires 1 GB of memory and only 50 MB of Free Space and Pentium processor.

Installation on Windows 10:

StellarPhoenixWindowsDataRecovery.exe file is only a 15.8MB file,click on Run button to execute the application. Almost instantly you will find the UAC prompt for this app, click ‘Yes’ to continue. It will be followed by a Welcome message. Very interestingly the licence agreement is already been checked. Click Next to proceed. By default the application is stored at C:\Program Files (x86)\Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery but one can change this location also. It requires almost 33.6 MB free hard disk space. There are user friendly options for creating shortcut on desktop or creating a quick launch menu. The installation gets completed almost within a minute. Simply great.

Click Start button you will easily find the app under Recently added I have made it Pin to Start in my Windows 10 Start menu

Operation:

Click on Steller Phoenix Data Recovery icon, click Yes to UAC prompt. You will find the user-friendly interface with a very clear instruction on which you like to recover.

There are three main categories:

Everything

Documents, Folders & Emails- has three subcategories

Multimedia files- has three subcategories

Here is the screenshot for better understanding:

Testing the Software:

Office documents:

Select Office documents under Data Recovery interface, click Next and select the location of your drive. And finally click Scan to proceed. It took only 1 min 53 seconds  to complete. It already recovered 369 files with a 341.39MB data recoverable. There is also option for deep scanning which is very fast

Once the scan is completed, you can select the files you want to recover.

Make sure that you have enough extra storage space available to save your recovered files on your local or external drive.

Recovering Emails:

It instantly recovered deleted emails. For saving the recovered emails I had to select the folder and the partition. It will recover Outlook emails. There is a difference between Free and Upgrade version. The free version recovers almost 75% where as if you upgrade or buy then you can recover 100%.

Recovering Photos:

Photos are the witnesses of our memories, our moments of life, if they got deleted somehow then we become so sad, depressed. Don’t worry it has an inbuilt Photo recovery option. The effective scan recovers the deleted photos within minutes.

One can also recover lost audio and videos.

Recovering from lost partition:

Recovering from lost partitions are also available. Select the drive, click Search. A scan for lost or deleted partitions will be performed in the selected disk or drive. If you can’t find the desired partition then try Deep Scan.

Some key features which I found:

Recovery from a formatted partition is also possible with this wonderful application.

You can resume recovery later also.

Very user friendly view of scanned Tree – File Type / Tree View / Deleted List

Category is super easy for a beginner also.

Improved preview support. Option to turn On/ turn Off preview of files while scanning is in progress

Simultaneous Scan of multiple File System (NTFS, FAT, FAT16, FAT32 and ExFat) in a logical drive.

Time taken for normal scan and deep scan are minimum.

Enhanced Scanning Progress and Details scanning status- scanning status, Time elapsed and Time Left.

The buttons under Advanced settings are user friendly.

One thing which I found bit confusing:

The Check for Updates didn’t work for full version. When I clicked on it remained same even there was a great speed of internet connectivity.

It may happen that at that moment there was no update available for the app. But there should have a pop up message for the same.

Remember the data recovery limit is 1GB for Free version. The update option is also available for the full version.

Overall it is an excellent data recovery software. It is very efficient, very fast, least resource hungry-just go for it. Stellar Data Recovery is a global leader in providing data recovery, data migration and data erasure solutions for the past two decades so when it comes to their products it is always peace of mind.

Note:

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Home edition

was tested on Windows 10 Enterprise Insider Preview Build #15048

Filed under: Downloads, Microsoft, Windows 10 Insider Preview

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