Western Digital Caviar RE2 500GB Hard Drive

Last Updated September 3, 2007   Product Rating   Easy-to-use interface Drive scans are very quick Preview files before recovery Lots of in-program help features   $100 price is a little high for home users

We can all relate to the situation of accidentally deleting that one important file after you have worked on it for hours, or those vacation photos from last summer. Whatever the scenario is, it would always be nice to have a way to recover deleted files. Well with Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Software you can do just that! It searches your hard drive (or any connected storage media) for any lost or deleted files and attempts to recover them to their original state.

Stellar Phoenix's Windows Data Recovery software has a pretty well thought out user interface, which makes it pretty easy to use. When you install and launch it, it will search for your hard drives and any portable media connected to your computer, including USB flash drives and digital camera memory chips. To scan a particular disk, you can simply double-click it and it will present you with a window telling you about three scanning options. The first of which is a Standard Scan, which does a "quick" scan of your hard drive's contents and looks for deleted files, but in our tests, this scan either produced an error message stating it didn't work once it was done or that it simply didn't find anything. We used the Advance Scan option, which does a more deeper scan of the disk in question and looks at the individual drive clusters. In our tests on a 400GB hard drive, a Standard Scan took about 6 minutes and an Advance Scan took only 5 minutes; both were generally fast for what they were doing. In scanning a 2GB USB flash drive, both scans took just seconds to complete. The third scanning option lets you make an image of your drive for recovery at a later date.

The user interface of Windows Data Recovery is pretty sleek and is very wizard based, which gives you lots of help along the way.

The select scan dialog window allows you to choose which drive scan you want to use to search for lost or damaged data. We recommend the Advance Scan for better results.

Once you have scanned your disk and have been presented with a listing of the files that it found, you can select each individual file and choose to view a preview of it to make sure it is the file you want. To recover a particular file or a large group of files, you just highlight them and click the recover button. The recovery menu lets you save the recovered files to your local computer in their original state, in a compressed folder, or even to an FTP server.

Results of a scan of a 1GB SD digital camera memory chip shows many files that can be recovered.

You can view a file preview of the file in question before you recover it.

Once you have selected the files you want to recover, you are presented with many different options of where to put the recovered files.

In our recovery tests, we were able to recover a few pictures that we deleted without any issues at all from a 1GB SD digital camera card. The recovery process takes just a few seconds per file, which is outstanding. Everything about Stellar Phoenix's Windows Data Recovery is pretty much "click-and-go." There is also lots of help along the way in the form of user guides to clickable help links in many of the dialog windows.

We really see a value for this product with it comes to digital photo recovery from camera chips and also businesses with mission critical information and files. The product is designed with user interaction in mind as well as guided help along the way. One important thing to remember with file recovery software is to use it as soon as possible after deleting the file in question. Doing so will increase your chances of recovering your file in its original condition. You can also use this product to recover hard drive data after you have formatted it or installed an operating system over it. However with that kind of recovery, you may or may not be able to recovery all of your data in their original state.

Stellar Phoenix's Windows Data Recovery software is a really well-written piece of software that does exactly what is advertised. It gives you access to tons of recovery tools and options to let you recover lost data after accidental deletion or format. Home users can purchase a lifetime license of Windows Data Recovery for $99, which we feel is a little high for the average home user and maybe could be $20 cheaper. You can also download a free trial version that lets you scan for lost data and see a preview of that data before you purchase it to actually do the recovery. To download, purchase, or find out more about Stellar Phoenix's Windows Data Recovery please visit their Web site.