Software comparison

Data recovery software comparison

Data recovery is the retrieval of data lost due to accidental formatting, deletion of wrong files, or some filesystem failure. The media being recovered is often a single hard or SSD disk with the average capacity, as of now, from 500GB to 2TB.

Since data recovery software can be narrowly functional, that is specialized for a particular filesystem or multipurpose when one software can recover many filesystems, I decided to test the chosen programs only for Windows filesystems, namely FAT, NTFS, and ReFS.

Testbed

I took a 1TB Western Digital internal hard drive connected to a motherboard via SATA as a tested device. There was a single partition formatted to NTFS and filled with data to about 40%. I have deleted three folders and started testing. As for recovery results, all programs have coped with the task; however, there is a set of other differences which you can find in the table.

Parameter	EaseUS^A	GetDataBack^B	ReclaiMe^C	RecoverMyFiles^D	R-Studio^E	Stellar Phoenix^F	UFS Explorer^G	ZAR^H
User experience and price
Price	69.95 USD	79 USD	79.95 USD	69.95 USD	79.99 USD	49 USD	39.95 EUR	69.95 USD
Ease of use	Easy	Moderate	Easy	Moderate	Complex	Easy	Complex	Moderate
Refund	Conditional	No	Unconditional	Conditional	No	Conditional	Conditional	Unconditional
Lifetime updates	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No	Yes
Recovery speed	Average	Average	Fast	Fast	Slow	Average	Average	Slow
User manual	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Supported filesystems
FAT	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
NTFS	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
exFAT	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
ReFS	No	No	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	No
APFS	Yes¹	No	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	No
Disk images
Create	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Load	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Files and preview
Structured folder tree	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Search	Yes²	No	Yes³	No	Yes⁴	Yes	Yes²	Yes³
File preview	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Hex preview	No	Yes	Yes	No⁴	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Preview during scan	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No
Additional capabilities
RAID capability	No	No	Yes⁵	Yes⁶	Yes	No	Yes⁶	Yes
Bootable CD	No	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Save state	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

^A EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard version 9.0, www.easeus.com
^B GetDataBack Simple version 1.02, www.runtime.org
^C ReclaiMe File Recovery Standard build 2715, www.reclaime.com
^D RecoverMyFiles version 5.2.1 (1964), www.recovermyfiles.com
^E R-Tools Technology R-Studio version 7.7.159562/11.08.2015, www.r-tt.com
^F Stellar Phoenix version 6.0.0.1, www.stellarinfo.com
^G UFS Explorer version 5.17.1 64-bit, www.ufsexplorer.com
^H ZAR X build 130, www.z-a-recovery.com

¹ Supported only in Mac version.
² Search for file names only.
³ Search using multiple criteria, such as creation or modification date and time, file size, and so on.
⁴ Hex preview is limited to Demo and Professional editions only.
⁵ With free add-on software, ReclaiMe Free RAID Recovery.
⁶ With paid plugins.