There’s a good reason why Disk Drill occupies the top spot in this ranking of hard drive recovery software, and that reason is its one-click approach to data recovery. You simply need to install the software on your computer, select your hard drive, and begin the recovery process with a single click. Disk Drill will automatically run all recovery methods in the optimal order to discover as many lost files as possible.
Our experience with Recuva is largely positive because this data recovery software does only a few things but does them well. Obviously, it recovers lost pictures, music, documents, videos, emails, and other file types from hard drives, USB flash drives, and other storage devices. It can also securely delete sensitive files using military-standard deletion techniques, which can be useful when preparing a computer for sale or donation.
R-Studio doesn’t hide the fact that it’s geared toward professionals, offering them features such as recovery over network and built-in hex editor. Granted, some of these features are present only in more expensive versions, such as R-Studio Network and R-Studio Technician, but they share the same user interface with R-Studio FAT, R-Studio NTFS, and R-STUDIO.
There’s a lot to like about EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard. For starters, the application can recover over 1,000 file formats - a lot more than most of its competitors. Its data recovery process is straightforward, and its ability to repair damaged or corrupt JPEG/JPG photos can save the day when dealing with data loss caused by logical damage.
Open-source data recovery software applications are as rare as rocking horse droppings, so any such application whose performance matches or even exceeds proprietary applications deserves everyone’s full attention. TestDisk is without a doubt among them, pairing impressive data recovery capabilities with the ability to recover lost partitions and make non-booting disks bootable again.
DiskDigger looks, feels, and controls like a Windows application, featuring a prominent ribbon with all important options and control buttons. You can use it to recover data from hard disks using the FAT (FAT12, FAT16, FAT32), NTFS, and exFAT file systems. Recoverable files can be filtered by name and size and sorted by name, size, date, and directory.
Lazesoft Data Recovery may not be the most modern hard disk data recovery tool out there, and it certainly doesn’t deliver the best data recovery results, but it has a different trick up its sleeve: unlimited free data recovery. That’s right, Lazesoft Data Recovery Home is completely free for non-commercial purposes, and you can use it to restore lost files after reformatting, accidental deletion, or malware attack.
Hard drive recovery software comes to the rescue whenever you lose important files from your hard drive. The best hard drive recovery applications can recover data even from a hard disk that has been accidentally formatted, improperly unmounted, badly partitioned, or otherwise damaged.
There are many hard drive recovery software applications that are easy enough to use even for complete beginners, and we’ve described several of them in this article. In most cases, all you need to do is select your hard drive, begin the recovery process, and then retrieve all lost files.