10 seasons of Two and a Half Men. 7 Seasons of The Big Bang Theory (okay, not exactly 7 as season 7 is still running). Countless movies. Thousands of amazing songs. And not to forget all those cherished memories (I hate to call them pictures). In the midst of all this data, it isn’t surprising if you lose something from your external drive on your computer or a hard disk. Yeah, you can get the downloaded stuff back (at the cost of bandwidth, obviously) but what about that picture (again, I use the word for lack of a better alternative) with your soul mate that hasn’t yet made its way to Facebook or that one word file containing your project work which hasn’t yet made its way to your dropbox account? What if some really important data eludes you? Don’t worry. All is not lost – check out the best data recovery software amongst these:
- Recuva – If you do just a little bit of research on the internet, you will realize that Recuva is most certainly the first choice of ‘undeleters’ (if you may call them that). It is free and does your work in a simple manner. What else does anyone need? Be it hard disks, USB’s or memory cards, Recuva can get your old files back with ease. It has a portable version as well as an installable version. For the less geeky out there, the difference between the two is that you need to install the latter version in order to use it. Needless to say, it is preferable to use the portable version. All latest versions of Windows are supported. You can download both the free and the paid versions from Piriform.com
- Pandora Recovery – Pandora Recovery (true to its name) surely opens a big Pandora’s Box of deleted files for you. This is another one of those great data recovery softwares. A very simple to use wizard and advanced filtering options are its biggest strengths. On the downside, it is not available in a portable version like the Recuva software. You need to install it first on your computer. This is disadvantageous because installing new software for recovering lost data from your computer takes up disk space and may overwrite on your deleted or lost data, reducing chances of recovering your precious data. The final verdict regarding Pandora Recovery is that you should try it if the other portable recovery data software like Recuva fails in your case.
Okay, now that we have covered the two free data recovery soft wares, let us take a look at a paid one. You must be thinking why someone would pay for a service which can be taken care of free of cost. It actually depends on the size of software developer’s heart. No kidding. There are some big-hearted software developers who make the full version of their software available to everyone on the net for free. But in some cases, the free version of the software will have certain limitations, like you can only recover a certain number of files or there might be a limit to the size of the files that you can recover. A lot of businesses go for paid versions of these data recovery soft wares because of these and many other added benefits.
- Stellar Phoenix – Stellar Phoenix is like the Recuva of paid data recovery software (or rather should I say, Recuva is the Stellar Phoenix of free data recovery software). Not only is it considered the best, but its biggest USP according to me is that it is not the most expensive one out there. Agreed, it is not cheap but it is certainly what you might call ‘value for money’. Enough about its price. Let’s talk about the stellar (they certainly thought through the name, didn’t they?) advantages that it offers the users. The first and the most important thing to know is that this software can recover nearly (hold your breath) 200 file types. Add to that the fact that you can even preview the files that it scans on your hard drive. This saves you from going to the trouble of recovering numerous files when you are just looking for one as you can see a preview of the files and make your decision. The only disadvantage is that even after buying the home version, you may be denied of certain features like creating a disc image, as Stellar Phoenix has reserved that for the pro version. So you may have to shell out a few extra bucks if you want the full Stellar experience.
If you are someone who is just looking to recover a few files here and there, then Recuva or Pandora Recovery should do the trick for you. Tech Tip: Once you know that you have lost some file(s) due to lack of storage space on your system, make sure you stop using your computer because every single task requires memory and the more memory gets used, the less are the chances for you to be able to recover your data. So make data recovery your first priority!
