minitool power data recovery free edition

When MiniTools adds a partial scan and better error handling, then it will be ready to run with the big boys as a pay-to-play product. There’s also the free, unlimited Recuva from Piriform, which doesn’t have the success rate of the others I’ve mentioned, but occasionally does the trick. The $70 personal version is a trick or two shy of claiming equality with the $30 File Recovery, $80 R-Tools R-Studio 7, and the $100 Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Pro-more mature utilities that offer the ability to scan only the undamaged portions of a hard drive. Paying for Power Data Recovery is a different matter.

That’s actually rather generous: The competition’s trial versions are generally limited to files sized less than 64KB, 1MB of data total, or something similarly minuscule. For free, it’s well worth a shot if the files you need to recover total less than 1GB. Operational issues aside, Power Data Recovery did recover data from most of my test media, which is the crux of the matter.

Scan operations can take a long time, and working around the Power Data Recovery window and dialog is annoying. The big window can’t be minimized, which gets in the way-and if the program hits a bad sector that it can’t skip, you may have to put up with the inconvenience for a long time.Īnother minor issue with Power Data Recovery is that currently, it can’t be minimized while it’s in operation. Power Data Recovery already saves the results of a scan for later recovery-a pro-level feature. Note: With most programs, Power Data Recovery included, you can stop, or un-hang the scan by disconnecting the drive being scanned. MiniTool informed me that they intend to add a partial scan option the near future. Other recovery programs hang on this particular drive as well (the Mac version of Stellar Phoenix excepted), but can be set to scan around the damaged sectors.

On my test disk with such damage, Power Data Recovery worked overnight and never moved past the damaged area, and never hinted why. Bad sectors often cause recovery programs to hang. But unlike those programs, Power Data Recovery provides no way to designate the start and end locations of a scan to skip bad sectors. In my hands-on, Power Data Recovery performed on par with R-Studio and File Recovery with the majority of my test media. MiniTool Power Data Recovery can recover lost or damaged partitions as well as damaged hard drives, flash memory drives, or optical media.

Minitool power data recovery free edition