Stellar Data Recovery

About this release

Recovery software is judged on the bad cases, not the easy ones. A file deleted an hour ago comes back from almost anything. This one is built for the harder situations: a partition that vanished, a drive that reports as unformatted, a card that was reformatted with photos still on it, or a volume with a damaged file table that the system refuses to mount at all.

Two scan depths cover the range. The quick scan reads the file system structures and returns names, folders and timestamps intact, which is what you want when the deletion was recent. The deep scan ignores the structures completely and rebuilds files from their signatures across the whole surface, which finds far more but returns generic names that have to be sorted through afterwards.

The preview is what makes a long recovery bearable. Images, documents, video and audio can be viewed before anything is written out, so a scan returning tens of thousands of fragments can be filtered down to the ones that actually opened correctly. Filters by type, size and relative age narrow the list further, and a scan can be saved and reloaded so a large job does not have to run twice.

The higher editions widen what it covers. Photo and video repair rebuilds files that recover in a damaged state, optical media and raw device imaging are included, and the technician edition adds recovery from arrays alongside the ability to work on an image file instead of the failing hardware, which is the correct approach when a drive is physically deteriorating.

What it does

Quick and deep scanning

Structure based recovery that keeps names and folders, plus signature based scanning that ignores a damaged file table.

Lost partition recovery

Find and rebuild volumes that no longer appear, including after a reformat.

Preview before writing

View recovered images, documents, video and audio before committing anything to disk.

Saveable scan sessions

Store a completed scan and reload it later so a long job never has to run twice.

Media repair

Rebuild photos and video that come back damaged, using a healthy sample file as a reference.

Imaging and arrays

Clone a failing drive to an image and recover from that, with array support in the technician edition.

Changed in this version

• Deep scan is faster on large capacity drives.
• Signature set extended with additional camera raw and video container formats.
• Preview handles high bitrate video without stalling the scan list.
• Improved reconstruction of fragmented documents.
• Scan session files are smaller and load faster.

System requirements

Install order

1. Install to a different drive than the one you intend to recover from.
2. Unpack the archive and run the installer.
3. Stop using the affected drive immediately to avoid overwriting recoverable data.
4. Choose a destination on separate storage before starting the recovery step.

Worth knowing before you start

File details