Recover Deleted Files in Windows

If you start with internal drives or relying on single storage drives for quite long, your next choice could be an external devices, then a portable drive and so on. This count will never end as you have realized that your requirements are endless. Everyone knows about most of the storage devices to fulfill our storage needs. However, are they aware about the tools to secure this stored data, recover accidentally deleted files or make the data inaccessible in case of any disaster or disk failure?

Most of the time users try free available data recovery products to recover their lost or inaccessible data. This may work or not, depends upon the complexity of the situation. At times, the consequence make the stored data permanently lost or non-recoverable due to overwriting. Since the lost data is very crucial for every user, therefore, it is important to use a product, which is reliable and assure the recovery of your lost or permanently deleted files or drive partitions.

I am a senior digital storage researcher in a known hard drive manufacturing firm, have done testing of hundreds of data recovery products to analyze their accuracy and reliability. Today I'll explain you one of my favorite product that I recommended to multiple users who often ask me about a good data recovery product for Windows platform. The name of the product is Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery, this version is specialized in recovering deleted or lost data or partitions of internal and external hard drive.

According to its developers, Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery – Home deals with most hard drive corruption and deletion issues. When you run the software, it will list all the storage drives and volumes connected to the system and will show three major options to initiate the recovery process of your lost volumes or files - Drive Recovery, Search lost volume and Photo recovery. Most of the time the data lost problem is related to these issues only.

Testing to Determine Data Recovery Capabilities

I have tested the software on a 2 TB hard drive (Model: Seagate Barracuda LP), and formatted all of its partitions to check the accuracy and efficiency of the product. I have selected 'Search and Lost Volumes' in order to restore the formatted volumes. This option showed me all the connected drives along with two scanning options – Quick Scan & Deep Scan, I have chosen deep scan as I want to include all the scanning criteria in my search. It was time consuming and took 6 hours to completely scan the hard drive.

However, after successful scan, the software showed a detailed list of all the four formatted volumes along with the drive names. In order to recover complete data from the recently found partitions, I have decided to run 'Disk recovery' process to recover lost files from hard drive partitions. This option offered me two new scanning modules - Normal scan and Advanced scan. To get each trace of lost files, I have selected 'Advanced' scan and initiated the scan after selecting 'Scan Now' option. The next window showed a process bar, which was symbolizing the scan progress. After successful scan, all the files and folders listed in the left pane of the window. I previewed all my files and saved them in a new location.

The available list of recoverable files can be customized by multiple options, so that you can categorize your files and folders according to your requirements. Additionally, the software also avails you a 'Search' box, which can find a particular type of formats in case you need. This search bar and 'Filtered Tree' option available in the left pane work similarly, you just need to type single or multiple file extensions after a '.'. It will list only the specified files and save your time.

Features

Photo Recovery : This is an important feature comes inbuilt with this utility to recover all the media files along with pictures, audios and videos, etc. To test it, I have selected an existing partition and choose 'Photo recovery' module. Under 'Scan Now' there was a 'File Type' option where you can select the file types for recovery according to your need, I have selected JPEG and clicked 'Scan now' to initiate the scan. This tool took 2 hours to scan all JPEG files and created a tree-structured list under 'Classic Tree' tab. This list contains a folder representing JPEG file type.

Conclusion

This tool can be useful for you if your hard drive or any other external storage media is corrupt or you have deleted some important files or volumes from your hard drive. Although, its scanning processes are quite slow, but the results will be satisfactory.