Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Professional Review with Ratings

A tech guy like me, relying on different gadgets for professional and personal tasks, needs to have some reliable data recovery solution for unforeseen data loss. There is a plethora of data recovery software available today but recovering your lost data can be quite a hassle. Thankfully though, recently I got a chance to assess Stellar data recovery and discovered some excellent features of this software which I would like to share with others like me. The market share of Stellar has increased exponentially in the last few quarters. I will analyze this software through its phases and evaluate whether it deserves to be in your toolkit or not. So, if you are looking to invest your
money in some good data recovery software, read this detailed review of Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery – Professional to let you see if it makes your list of best data recovery software

Features at a glance

Before getting into a detailed review itself, let us summarize the key features of stellar data recovery version 7.

Feature Name	Description
Multi-Format Support	Recovers document and media files from more than 190 formats
Media detection	Automatic detection of any external media device attached
Optional Preview	Option to view the files during scanning of device
Emails	Can recover deleted outlook mails
Ghost Image	option to create a replica of either a full drive or an individual partition
Partition Recovery	Recovers lost partitions that include FAT, NTFS, and exFAT
File Deletion	Recovers the files accidentally deleted (even from Recycle Bin)
Deep Scan	Improved in-depth scan in case basic scan fails to recover files
Customized scan	Option to select the specified location/file type/folder instead of full drive scan
User Friendly Interface	A simple to use interface with clear and large buttons
Price	$99

Setup and Interface

The installation is quite easy after you download the Stellar setup file (executable). After a few simple steps, you need to input the license key to enjoy the full features of the software. When you start the software from the desktop shortcut, you will get a menu screen similar to windows explorer. The menu is divided into three sections that include All Files, Documents-Folders-Emails, and Multimedia-Files. By default, all files are selected. If your lost files include all types of files you can proceed to the next screen otherwise, you can select particular file types.

The interface is clear and simple with menu buttons that are arranged spaciously. Once you select the type of files to be recovered, the next screen asks for the data recovery location. As you can see in the screenshot below, there are various options for locations that include, common folders like My-documents, desktop, and drive partitions of your storage device.

In case, one of the partitions is missing from the locations, you can recover the lost partition from the “ Can’t Find Drive” option. Here you select the location and press the scan button. It will show the recovered files/folder in the window. If you think this is the folder you are looking for, press recover. You need to specify the destination folder where you want to save the recovered files.

Performance

To test the performance of the software, I permanently deleted (by pressing shift+Del) all the files from one of the folders in My Documents of C Drive. The files were of multiple extensions like pdf, pst, media, text, and excel. The recovery was super-fast and took just a few seconds to scan and recover the folder. Out of 27 files, Stellar was able to recover 25 files so I lost two PDF files.

In my second test, formatted a USB drive and tried to recover the deleted data. Before deletion, it had 8 files with ppt, excel, word, Zip, PNG, and PDF extensions. First I tried normal scanning mode. It took around 1 minute and could not recover any of the files. So I ran a deep scan on the formatted USB drive. It showed the estimated time as 2 hours to complete the 8 phases. But actually, it took around 20 minutes, and to my surprise, it scanned and recovered around 70 files. There were around 7 folders with arbitrary names. I was able to recover all my eight files along with other files that were deleted in the last 3 months.