Best file recovery freeware

Beginners might find the terminology and design of PC Inspector File Recovery intimidating, and even some more advanced users may find the workflow a little confusing to start with. Take some time to learn your way around it, and you'll find a powerful data recovery program — but one that seems to get better results with FAT and FAT32 drives. Presented as a pair of tools rather than a single integrated solution, TestDisk and PhotoRec together can recover data from both lost partitions and files.

TestDisk takes care of the partition side of things. The fact that it's a command line tool with no graphical interface might off-putting at first. If can set this to one side though, there's help on hand to guide you through the process of working with your drives. TestDisk offers support for so many file systems, it should cater for most eventualities. PhotoRec is the component for recovering files.

It's available with a command lint interface, but unlike TestDisk there's also a GUI for less confident users. It may not be as intuitive as some of the other recovery software in this listing, but it's effective. PhotoRec is cross-platform and can be run as a portable app from a USB stick, which means you don't have to install it on your PC and risk accidentally overwriting the data you want to recover. Read our full TestDisk and PhotoRec review.

Despite the inclusion of the word "pro" in the name, this program is still free; there is, in fact, no non-pro version. Recovery can be a little hit and miss as there is no indication of the quality or recoverability of files — you just have to hope that the file that are found are in a reasonable state. When it comes to data recovery, there aren't really all that many options other than the ability to search for particular types of files to reduce the size of the list you have to sort through.

In terms of extras you also get a disk snapshot tool which basically backs up your drive so you can recover data at your leisure, a secure file deletion tool, and email recovery. Worth checking out, even if this is not necessarily the best of the bunch. Brian has over 30 years publishing experience as a writer and editor across a range of computing and technology titles, and has been interviewed multiple times for BBC News and BBC Radio.

He is also a science fiction and fantasy author, writing as Brian G Turner. North America. The best data recovery software and services makes it simple and easy to recover deleted files and folders on your computer, mobile device, or storage media.

Today's top data recovery deal. View Deal. Stellar Data Recovery The best file recovery software. Disk Drill A complete disk recovery solution.

CrashPlan The best file recovery service. This gives you the ability to recover anything you need without having to worry about hitting the limit, and you can restore large files for which other programs would require payment.

Instead, you can simply put the program on a USB drive, making the application portable and stopping it from interfering with its purpose. For these reasons and more, IObit Undelete comes with very positive reviews and most of its users are extremely satisfied, especially with the value it provides without any cost.

For simple, free memory card recovery software, IObit Undelete is among the top options, for its unlimited recovery ability, portability without installation, and easy to use interface. While the five programs on this list are among the best available for SD card data recovery, each one comes with a unique set of features and shortcomings that makes it particularly useful for a certain audience.

A professional data recovery center should be able to transplant the flash memory chip from your broken SD card to a suitable donor SD card and recover your data for you.

Both Windows and Mac come with a utility that you can use to repair SD card corruption. Restoring files from RAW SD cards usually takes slightly longer than restoring files from formatted SD cards, but the results can be just as great.

Android users can choose from several SD card recovery apps, each offering a slightly different set of features and capabilities.

Based on our testing, DiskDigger delivers the best results and a truly straightforward data recovery experience. Former computer specialist at IBM. To restore the selected partitions, click Finish. The restored partitions allow a user to view the contained files to verify whether the restored partition is the desired one.

Nonetheless, MiniTool is adept at recovering lost partitions efficiently without leaving Windows and has a simple interface. MiniTool Power Data Recovery v9. It can undelete files that were too big to fit in the Recycle Bin or that have been erased through the use of the Cut command. The tool does not come with technical support so users are on their own when recovering their lost data.

The user interface of Undelete gives away the fact that this data recovery software comes from the Office era, when ribbon-based user interface design was all the rage. While still easy to use, the user interface looks a bit dated today, and it could definitely use an overhaul. The last version of Undelete was released in February , and everything indicated that this data recovery application has been abandoned by its developers.

However, data recovery software is the only way to recover deleted files that are no longer in the Recycle Bin and are not backed up. Data recovery software is especially useful in situations when you accidentally formatted a storage device or deleted an important file and immediately realized your mistake. Because deleted files are still physically present on the storage device until other files use the space they occupy, you should be able to get them back without any issues.

All you need is a reliable data recovery software application. While non-mechanical issues are relatively easy to deal with, physical damage presents a serious obstacle to data recovery, usually requiring the expertise of a professional data recovery service like CleverFiles Data Recovery Center. Each year, data storage provider Backblaze publishes hard drive reliability statistics based on its experience with running over , spinning hard drives in data centers on two continents.

In , the annualized hard drive failure rate in Backblaze data centers was 1. Clearly, hard drive manufacturers still have some work to do to make hard drives more reliable. Data recovery software works by restoring access to files deleted by the operating system. When the OS deletes a file it removes logical access but leaves the physical data on the disk.

Data recovery software is safe to use and will not lead to further data loss. In cases where your drive is experiencing physical problems, attempt to make a byte level backup to be used when performing the recovery. Then you can recover without adding stress to the degraded disk. Yes, with some restrictions. Drives that are not using TRIM can be recovered with software.

There are many SD card recovery applications available. Some solutions are specifically developed for photo recovery. The best SD card recovery software is:. Not all data recovery solutions are compatible with the Mac operating system.

The best data recovery software applications for Mac are:. Menu Search. Site search. Did you just lose a valuable file that would take you several days of work to replace? Last Updated: Dec 17, You can rate how useful this article was at the end of the page. Jump to: Results. Useful Video. Comparison table. Written by. Jeff Cochin. Best Data Recovery Software. We wanted to identify the most popular recovery tools so we could see if their popularity is justified. We looked for solutions that had all the features required to reliably recover your lost data.

We tried to locate tools that have received positive reviews as an indicator of solutions worth trying. Free download Visit website. Disk Drill is unquestionably a formidable hard drive data recovery software that ranks high in the information technology industry.

This application, developed by CleverFiles, is uniquely tailored to scan both external and internal storage devices, from your local disk drive to portable USB drives and SD cards. Free trial. Overall experience. Features that bring Disk Drill on top of the list are: User-friendly For first-time users, working, downloading, and installing Disk Drill is a walk in the park. Excellent recovery results When it comes to the actual data recovery statistics, Disk Drill is unmatched.

Data Protection The two central features that maintain Disk Drill's supreme reign as an excellent data recovery software are its supplementary data loss prevention utilities. There is no mouse support. TestDisk As a companion program of PhotoRec, TestDisk is much more effective in retrieving data from computer hard drive partitions which are missing, deleted, formatted or corrupted and also have a similar DOS-like command line data recovery interface.

Cons : You are supposed to Log in with administrator account to operate this software on your PC. Only computer keyboard buttons could be used to give any order while using this software. People are supposed to restart computer to access the data you have retrieved.

Offer Rescan drive button to allow users to restart a drive scanning directly. Cons : Scanned files could not be previewed there. Do not work when your storage device is physically damaged. Highlight desired files one by one, since there is no special option to select all files with one click. Fail to close this software all the time during testing and have to end it with Windows task manager. Free undelete Free Undelete is also another completely free data recovery utility to help people recover deleted files with ease and fast speed.

Pros : It is surely free to recover files deleted or emptied from Recycle Bin by accident or mistake. It is fast and the device scanning process is able to be completed with seconds. Easily Double click the desired partition or device to start a quick scanning.

Could not review the scanned data, but, a window will be popped out tell whether the file is successfully recovered or not. Offer a filter function to find files according to names or file types. Clear filter, when it is not necessary any longer. Select another storage device to hold all retrieved files so that any new data will not rewrite your original information.

Cons : It is free for personal user only. No shortcut button to select all files at once. Highlight your desired files one by one. Recovered files will not be packed into one file folder automatically created. Wise data recovery Wise Data Recovery software is completely free data recovery software that scans your hard drives, memory cards and flash drives fast and also recover deleted, missing, inaccessible and lost files easily and effectively.

Pros : It runs really fast Just complete GB partition scanning within seconds in our tests. Offers many common language options.

Offers fast search tool to find needed images, audios, videos, documents, emails and files. Freely input key words there. A portable version allows people to take it elsewhere with a removable storage device. Works well from Windows XP to Windows 8 computers. Cons : Retrieved files are not listed in their original folder structure.