DATA RECOVERY SOFTWARE REVIEWS
Data recovery software reviews
What is data recovery software and why use it?
Data is a critical asset these days. Organizations bank on the integrity of their proprietary information otherwise they might simply run out of business. Most end users, in their turn, store gigabytes of family photos and videos, as well as important tax and work documents on their hard drives. Whereas the use of cloud services to maintain file backups is gaining popularity, there are still plenty of predicaments where a file obliterated from an onsite storage appears to be lost for good because it was the only copy available. Data may vanish from media for a variety of physical and logical causes, ranging from accidental deletion, operating system crashes or hardware glitches, all the way to the adverse effects of computer infections like ransomware that encrypt one’s files and erase the original entries. In the unfavorable paradigm with a single point of failure, data recovery software can become the missing piece. These tools leverage complex forensic techniques to identify recoverable objects and reinstate them. Aside from the indisputable usefulness of data recovery software in the commonplace file shredding scenarios, it can also be a lifesaver for restoring the information held hostage by crypto ransomware, which is the plague du jour in the contemporary computer threat landscape.
Best date recovery software review: evaluation criteria
There’s an abundance of competing file recovery products on the market. While none of them can boast 100% restoration success rate, some are questionably reliable and some fare appreciably better in locating and reviving data items removed for whatever reason. Below is the list of benchmarking parameters that an unbiased and accurate evaluation should revolve around. These criteria allowed us to discern the fine line between mediocre and top-performing utilities in this niche.
- Usability: Does it take a rocket scientist to install the application? Is it user-friendly? How long does it take to the scan for deleted data? Is the scan report easy to interpret? How big is the app’s footprint in the system? Is it easy to customize? These are some of the questions to ask when analyzing a data recovery product. The best ones are lightweight, fast, and easy to install, use and adjust to one’s preferences.
- Features: Data recovery isn’t a domain where the ad hoc products accommodate tons of features. Their usage boils down to scanning disks, finding potentially recoverable files, and performing on-demand restoration thereof. In addition to customizable scanning functionality, the best recovery tools provide a search feature allowing users to narrow down their lookup and find a specific object or group of objects that share a certain common attribute. Furthermore, labeling entries in a scan report by the probability of successful recovery can help prioritize the restoration.
- Efficiency: Whether or not a data recovery program does its job right is a matter of how accurately it locates deleted files and how efficiently it recovers them. Another associated attribute to look at is whether the application is capable of recovering data removed a while ago as opposed to recently erased items only. Furthermore, an important criterion is how well the solution copes with the recovery of files locked by crypto ransomware. It should take seconds to reinstate a random selected object as long as its state is good enough.
- Support: Even with industry-leading products, file recovery issues are barely avoidable. This is why it’s important to be able to get prompt troubleshooting assistance whenever something goes wrong. Ideally, live tech support should be at the customer’s fingertips.
- This, however, may not be the case with free data recovery software, for obvious reasons. Whereas toll-free phone support and online chat with the vendor’s tech team reps are preferable, the app should at least provide a link to a page that contains FAQs and articles on widespread issues previously reported by users. Also, the availability of a lively community forum is definitely on the plus side of a product being reviewed.
