Top 5 Best Free Data Recovery Software

December 31 2017

1. Recuva:

Recuva is a free app that can recover deleted files from a hard drive, SD card, USB stick or other storage media. It can be a real lifesaver, and is an essential part of any emergency toolkit.

• Superior file recovery
• Advanced deep scan mode
• Secure overwrite feature that uses industry & military standard deletion techniques and,
• Ability to recover files from damaged or newly formatted files
• Easy User interface

2. Undelete 360:

Undelete 360 is one of the best programs to use for restoring accidentally or unintentionally deleted files from your computer, regardless of storage medium.

• Works on a variety of devices such as Digital cameras, USBs etc.
• It includes a data-wiping tool, a Hex Viewer along with the ability to preview files before recovery.
• Does a great job in recovering recently deleted files as compared to other free data recovery software
• Also able to recover files of a wide variety of types such as DOC, HTML, AVI, MP3, JPEG, JPG, PNG, GIF, etc.

However, scanning speed needs major improvement and it also lags out its competition in terms of recovering data.

3. TestDisk:

TestDisk is powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software: certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.

TestDisk can

• Fix partition table, recover deleted partition
• Recover FAT32 boot sector from its backup
• Rebuild FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 boot sector
• Fix FAT tables
• Rebuild NTFS boot sector
• Recover NTFS boot sector from its backup
• Fix MFT using MFT mirror
• Locate ext2/ext3/ext4 Backup SuperBlock
• Undelete files from FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext2 filesystem
• Copy files from deleted FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext2/ext3/ext4 partitions.

TestDisk has features for both novices and experts. For those who know little or nothing about data recovery techniques, TestDisk can be used to collect detailed information about a non-booting drive which can then be sent to a tech for further analysis. Those more familiar with such procedures should find TestDisk a handy tool in performing onsite recovery.

4. PhotoRec:

PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from hard disks, CD-ROMs, and lost pictures (thus the Photo Recovery name) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec ignores the file system and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media's file system has been severely damaged or reformatted.

• Compatible with almost all major platforms such as Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS X etc.
• Comes packed with the ability to recover more than 440 different file formats.
• Features such as the ‘unformat function’ and the ability to add your own custom file types do come in handy.

Although I wouldn’t advise this free data recovery software to beginners as it is completely devoid of a GUI and uses a command line interface which may intimidate some users.

5. Pandora Recovery:

Pandora Recovery allows you to find and recover recoverable deleted files from NTFS and FAT-formatted volumes, regardless of their type - you can recover pictures, songs, movies or documents. 

• Ability to recover deleted files from NTFS and FAT-formatted volumes
• Preview deleted files of certain types (image and text files) without performing recovery
• With surface scan (which allows you to recover data from drives that have been formatted) and the ability to recover archived, hidden, encrypted and compressed files, it packs quite a punch.
• Its interface is very easy to get a hang of and provides an explorer-like view along with color coded and recovery percentage indicators.

However, its file detection system is not that reliable and needs to be improved further. The software could be made portable as well so that it doesn’t consume any space on the hard disk and thereby not consume space that a file which we wish to recover once consumed.