The booming market of data recovery tools brought us dozens of products and literally hundreds of their clones. With that much choice, it’s not easy for uneducated consumers to choose the right data recovery tool from the right supplier.
Here at HQ Recovery Headquarters we’ll try to cover the differences between the many types of data recovery products, test their performance on a unified test bench, analyze supplier’s approach to updates and technical support, and give a weighed recommendation.
There are several categories of data recovery tools. While many tools from different categories are, indeed, very similar, choosing the proper category is essential to receive the best possible outcome without overpaying.
Essentially, there are four categories. The Undelete Software category reviews data recovery tools that will recover lost and deleted files of all types. Tools from this category will not attempt to re-build a damaged hard disk or repair disk system structures. However, some of the better tools will cope well with severely damaged media, and will properly recover files from formatted, repartitioned and corrupted disks, memory cards and other storage media.
Multimedia Recovery Tools lists products designed to recover digital pictures, music and video files. While being similar to the Undelete category, these tools are generally restricted to multimedia files only. However, some of the better multimedia recovery products come with extra functionality allowing to repair damaged pictures, music and video files, allowing them to be opened in viewing and editing applications even if parts of the file have been overwritten.
Similar to multimedia recovery, Office Recovery Tools contains reviews of data recovery tools designed to undelete and/or repair documents produced with office applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel, Access, and similar OpenOffice applications. Some of the better tools from this category combine the ability to undelete erased documents with extensive repair functionality, extracting every bit of usable information out of corrupted documents. Some other tools will only offer to repair documents stored on a healthy disk. In our experience, there is a huge difference in quality of data recovery products listed in this category.
Finally, there are Disk Recovery Tools that will attempt to repair disk system structures such as the file system, partition tables, MBR and so on. Most tools in this category will also be able to recover files and folders stored on the disk being repaired, but some will not.