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Stellar Data Recovery Professional Review

We are putting Stellar Data Recovery to the test, one of the best known recovery tools for Windows 10.

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With more of a decade on the market Stellar Data Recovery Professional is one of the big names among data recovery applications.

It retrieves deleted and otherwise lost files from hard drives, USB sticks, or other storage devices.

In this we are showing you what the software has to offer and how effectively its version for has performed in our own test.

Before speaking about results, let´s have a look about the different plans and features. There are plenty of them hidden behind a quite minimalistic and easy to use GUI.

Stellar Data Recovery: Available plans and pricing

Besides a free trial version which only offers detection of lost files, Stellar Data Recovery is available in three commercial editions. In our review, we are focusing on the Professional version for Windows 10. The editions below are also available for macOS.

Stellar Data Recovery Professional – $79.99 (1 year); $99.99 (lifetime)
Stellar Data Recovery Premium – $99.99 (1 year); $149 (lifetime)
Stellar Data Recovery Technician – $199 (1 year)

Professional Premium Technician
Recover Photos, Videos & Other Files X X X
Recovery from Any Storage Media X X X
Advanced Partition Recovery X X X
BitLocker Data Recovery X X X
Unbootable System Data Recovery X X X
Recovers Any Photo, Video, Document, Database or Email File Formats X X X
Create Image Option for Badly Corrupt Hard Drive X X X
Recover Data from CD/DVD X X X
Video Repair
Repairs MOV, MP4, MPEG, MTS, MKV, FLV & more video files X X
Repairs Multiple Corrupt Videos X X
Photo Repair
Repairs Corrupt JPEG, CR2, CRW, TIFF & more photo files X X
Extracts thumbnails of images for badly corrupt Photos X X
RAID Recovery
Data Recovery from RAID 0, 5 and 6 Hard Drives X
Data Recovery from FAT, exFAT & NTFS RAID Volumes X
Create Virtual RAID When Reconstruction Fails X

Installation and Scanning

Installation of Stellar Data Recovery Professional takes just a few minutes and then you are ready to go for your first scan.

On the main dashboard you select what you need to recover – either “All Data” the software can find or particular file types such as Office documents, emails from Outlook and other clients, photos, audio files or videos. You can also select to scan for particular folders.

Stellar Data Recovery Professional - Select What to Recover

After selecting what Stellar Data Recovery Professional should scan for, you select the drive, medium or location and just hit the blue “Scan” button. Optionally you can already activate the much slower “Deep Scan” on this screen. But Stellar Data Recovery Professional will offer that later if the quick scan was not successful.

Stellar Data Recovery Professional - Select Recovery Type
After the scan you can browse through the found folders and files using different views. “Tree View” provides a folder-subfolder structure of what has been found, showing the recoverable files on the bottom right. But you can also switch to “File type”-view where you can select to recover just certain filetypes.

For some supported filetypes Stellar Data Recovery Professional offers a preview which comes handy especially for photos.

You can also use a keyword search if you are on the hunt for a particular file or set of files. After making your choice, hitting “Recover” will start the recovery procedure.

Stellar Data Recovery Professional - Tree View

You will have to select a separate drive with enough space. There are also “Advanced Settings” with some filters for the recovery process.

Stellar Data Recovery Professional - Tree View - Recover

There you can activate “Zip”-File creation which will save some space but also slow down the recovery procedure. There you can also set certain filters to exclude certain file types or just recover those.

Stellar Data Recovery Professional - Tree View - Recover - Advanced Settings

The recovery itself can take up to several hours depending on the amount of data and it might be a wise decision to run Stellar Data Recovery overnight. Once the procedure is done, you will find all found files and folders in the previously selected destination.

Stellar Data Recovery Professional - Tree View - Recovery

Recovery Performance

We tried Stellar Data Recovery on a PC with an i7-4770K CPU, 16 GB RAM recovering from a mid-range 2 TB Western Digital HDD (WD20EZRX) from 2017.

We chose to recover completely a fast formatted 60 GB partition holding a full Windows 10 system including user accounts and more than 150.000 files. As the quick scan did not provide any results we switched to deep scan.

After the whole procedure was finished, we found most of the files and the folder structure restored with their correct names. There were however a few folders which Stellar Data Recover could not identify correctly and saved as “Lost Folders”.

Overall this is a great result as recovery from an already formatted drive is a more complex task than just recovering deleted files. As the free trial version offers you to run deep scans, you can give Stellar Data Recovery a try and see if it´s worth a purchase.

Conclusion

Stellar Data Recovery has a higher price tag than some similar products from other companies but offers a great feature set and recovery performance is outstanding. As the trial version provides a clear picture if Stellar Data Recovery will work for you, we highly recommend to give this veteran of data recovery a chance.

Last Updated on February 16, 2021 1:37 pm CET by Markus Kasanmascheff

Markus Kasanmascheff
Markus Kasanmascheff
Markus is the founder of WinBuzzer and has been playing with Windows and technology for more than 25 years. He is holding a Master´s degree in International Economics and previously worked as Lead Windows Expert for Softonic.com.
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