5 Best Alternatives to Data Rescue

Just one glance at the table above makes the vast difference between Data Rescue and Disk Drill crystal clear.

Let’s start with the basics: Disk Drill supports the 3 most used Windows file systems – FAT32, ExFAT, and NTFS. Data Rescue only provides advanced support for NTFS file systems, but does at least produce average results when restoring recently deleted files from FAT32 and ExFAT volumes.

In terms of user experience, Disk Drill also emerges as the clear victor. Disk Drill provides a sleek and intuitive interface and makes it easy for users to organize found files. Disk Rescue looks and feels like a program from the 90s – it’s ugly, it only offers one view, and there is no way to sort and filter results.

Finally, Disk Drill simply has more features that make its users' lives easier, such as S.M.A.R.T. monitoring and session management.

The finishing move for this round is the big difference in pricing and consequent value. Disk Drill only costs $89 for unlimited recovery for life. This sealed the deal for its #1 spot.

It’s clear that Data Rescue and DiskGenius are developed for different types of users. While Data Rescue better serves the casual user who needs to recover 1-2 important files, DiskGenius solves more complex data recovery problems.

It offers better RAID support than Data Rescue, and accommodates bad disks with features like Disk surface test, S.M.A.R.T. and bootable recovery, and BitLocker support. Not to mention the many features that DiskGenius’ free version offers for disk management.

And when it comes down to it, DiskGenius performed better than Data Rescue during our live data recovery tests.

Neither Data Rescue nor DiskGenius has the sleek interface of the other entries featured in this article. However, the latter is geared more toward professionals and puts functionality above aesthetics.

The verdict: for users that are willing to endure DiskGenius’ learning curve, they’ll find a powerful disk recovery and management tool that is worth a lot more than what Data Rescue currently offers for its price.

Many users are familiar with PhotoRec's Command Prompt-like interface, which can be intimidating. Fortunately, as shown in the screenshots above, users can now download QPhotoRec, which is a graphical user interface for the app. While others will like its simplicity, it lacks the bells and whistles of other tools that make recovery more efficient.

But when it comes down to it, PhotoRec performs a lot better than Data Rescue. Even if it’s incapable of recovering folder structure, it still recognized and restored a lot more files than Data Rescue did.

It’s also 100% free, compared to Data Rescue’s pricey payment options ($19 per file or just under $400). Granted, it’s been a few years since PhotoRec has been significantly updated, but it’s had no problem keeping up with the latest operating systems and media file types.

That said, Data Rescue provides important features that PhotoRec lacks – such as RAID support, byte-to-byte backups, and disk cloning. The verdict will come down to each user’s individual needs.

Stellar Data Recovery is well-known for its modern and sleek user interface that is designed to help casual users restore data easily. This is most notable when handling scan results. Stellar provides tools to preview, filter, and sort found files – Data Rescue offers none of these features.

Stellar also provides important recovery features like BitLocker support, bootable recovery, and lost partition scanning, which may be important for certain users. It even offers corrupted video and photo repair tools (but those are reserved for higher-tiered subscriptions).

Unfortunately, Stellar loses 1 major point against Data Rescue: it crashes a lot. However, when it does work, it recovers roughly the same amount of data that Data Rescue does overall. Data Rescue also works better with unmountable partitions and document recovery.

However, Stellar’s comparatively cheaper entry price ($49.99 per year for unlimited recovery) seals the deal for us as a proper Data Rescue alternative.

Recuva is a very popular data recovery software for 2 reasons: (1) it's free, and (2) despite its price tag, it’s actually very reliable.

Recuva can restore a respectable amount of data across the 3 major file types (images, videos, documents) and its quick scan works with FAT32, ExFAT, and NTFS partitions. However, Data Rescue scored slightly higher in all our real-life data recovery tests.

Recuva also provides important recovery features like BitLocker support and Windows shadow copies scanning, as well as scan results filtering – tools that Data Rescue lacks.

That said, Data Rescue has a few major advantages over Recuva. First, it has better customer support. Second, Data Rescue is equipped for more complex problems – it supports RAID, JBOD, and unmountable partitions. It also provides a disk cloning tool.

Recuva has a lot of flaws, but its price tag and reliability keep it at the top of the list of paid software alternatives.