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.
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.