Review : Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Pro

Data loss can come in many forms with partition loss being one of the major blows. While losing any kind of important data from your hard drive or external drive or any other drive is a disaster, losing an entire partition full of important documents, music files, photos and videos could just be devastating. Imagine a scenario where one day you aren’t able to see an entire hard drive volume or partition on your computer. What would your reaction be? Utter shock followed by sheer panic!

Thankfully, products like Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Professional exist that promise to fully recover lost, deleted or formatted Windows partitions through a simple procedure. Also dubbed Windows Partition Recovery Software owing to its focus to the task, this application performs much more than that and is recommended by some of the top technical magazines and forums. Well then, let us also scrutinize it from all aspects and see if it’s actually worth all the fuss.

Product Features

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Professional is a complete package of advanced recovery options wrapped within an easy-to-understand user interface. This extremely useful software efficiently restores lost, deleted or inaccessible hard drive partitions to save you from the disaster of losing data due to accidental deletion or formatting.

Here’s a Detailed Description of the Exciting Features of this Tool:

•    Regardless of whether your data got lost due to accidental media formatting, disk corruption or unintentional deletion, this software will hunt for them on your hard drive and dig them out in no time.
•    It supports data recovery from FAT, NTFS, and ExFAT drives and volumes.
•    Can’t find a Windows partition or accidentally formatted one? That’s no problem for Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Professional. It allows searching for missing, deleted or crashed partitions on the hard drive and recovering them through a range of options.
•    The application includes an advanced ‘Raw Recovery’ option to randomly scan the physical disk for lost data if other recovery modes don’t yield desired results. This feature uses a high-tech file signature based matching to identify and recover files.
•    The tool supports a broad range of file formats including various formats for document, photo, video, movie and other multimedia files. In addition to recovering data from PCs, it is equally capable of recovering data from digital cameras, laptops, memory cards, and external media devices.
•    It works just fine to recover data from any damaged or improperly burnt optical media including CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray discs etc that is recognized by your Windows system.
•    In a unique bid, this software comes with a feature to recover deleted emails from MS Outlook and Outlook Express with their original format intact and allows saving them as EML, PST or MSG files.
•    The best part of this software is its preview feature. Through this feature users can get a glimpse of recoverable files thus giving them the freedom to choose whether they wish to purchase the software and recover the files or not.

In addition to the amazing features mentioned above, this application comes with a bundle of additional features aimed at solving different purposes like hard disk imaging, saving data to a boot-up disc for instances where the boot sector of a computer crashes, hard drive cloning, hard drive monitoring and more. So come to think of it, Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Professional is not a single software; it has many utilities bundled into one software package.

How does it perform?

On launching the product you land up at the main interface that presents you with Drive Recovery, CD / DVD Recovery and Photo Recovery options. Once you select a recovery option, you’re supposed to choose a scanning mode from Quick, Deleted, Advanced or go for Raw recovery. While Quick scan suffices for most cases, some instances might need the Advanced scan. Go for Raw recovery only if you can’t find your files through the other options since it will take significantly longer time.

In our tests, overall the product performed well with all recovery options with the only difference of time taken in each. Results were satisfactory and in some cases excellent. We couldn’t find any glitches and working with the tool was quite easy.

System Requirements & Compatibility

To download, install and successfully launch this software you’ll need at least 50 MB of free hard disk space and at least 512 MB of RAM. It is available as a single user license meaning that it can be installed only on one machine at a time.

In addition to supporting a broad range of document, photo and multimedia formats, this software allows data recovery from Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista and XP.

Product Strengths VS Product Weaknesses

Stellar Phoenix WDR Professional manages to bag some very crucial plus points under its belt:

•    Recovers lost files and partitions post a variety of disastrous situations
•    Easy to use and hassle free
•    Support for Windows 10, 8 and 7
•    Minimum system requirements
•    Works on a variety of media
•    Allows user-defined file type searches
•    One of the best built-in file previewers assuring of recovering files shown
It’s tough to say no to a software that does all that! However, there are a few ignorable minus points too:
•    Scanning might take a little time depending on the amount of data on the drive or the size of the partition lost
•    For a first time user, the range of recovery options might seem confusing initially
•    Of course, there’s a price tag!

Final Verdict

Overall, Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Professional is a powerful application to recover lost partitions and files from Windows based devices. It has an impressive suite of features and many small utilities that come along with it. While some people may find it slow or pricy, the fact remains, that this software is one of the best data recovery solutions available in the market as of date and offers more reliable and accurate data recovery than most of its competitors. In our opinion, that’s all that matters.