Stellar Windows DATA Recovery 6.0
Stellar Phoenix offers a wide range of effective recovery software’s from long time. This includes Disk Recovery, Mac tools, Email Tools, Email Repair, Password Recovery, Database Recovery, File Repair and Windows Tool. Among which we will talk about Windows DATA Recovery 6.0. This is effective data recovery software with simple interface and great features. Last time we had reviewed Stellar Windows DATA Recovery 5 and now we will test the new version 6.0. It offers some additional feature compare to the older one and is more effective in terms of performance. The software usually comes in three editions. They are Home (best for single user), Professional (advance recover y) and Technician (RAID, Remote Recovery). I am working on the Technician edition, which has complete pack of features including basic and advance options as well. DATA Recovery is a crucial process. It must be handle by Expert Tools so that you get your files intact. Growing technology has also increased the risk of losing data instantly. The loss can be associated with software and hardware level damage.
No it is wrong to say that Windows DATA Recovery 6.0 can drag out the data from a dead hard drive. It works well on software level. A similar incidence occurred to me some weeks ago. I was cleaning my system. I have a 500GB Western Digital hard drive. It felled from my hand. I thought the drive is dead. After connecting and turning my pc on I found one partition missing. There were total 4 partitions among which one has the entire backup of software’s and files. And that partition was not visible. That was so rude. It would have taken my video partition. I would be more than happy to sacrifice it. I tried using TEST Disk the only tool I know to recover deleted partition. It failed to work. I tried Windows DATA Recovery 6.0 also. But nothing was found. The reason was hardware fault. The platter inside the drive that has the partition was crashed. Due to which only 3 partitions were visible.
So that happened suddenly. But through Windows DATA Recovery I found some old files which were accidentally deleted by me. The software works effectively if you install it before. Not after crash or after deleting the files. This was my experience. The most common thing everyone faces is accidental deletion of files. This can be done by you, or buy your friends how is using your system or by kids at home. And when you came to know, there is nothing you can do here. At that moment you realize the importance of data recovery software. We will see all the features in detail.
Interface:
The reason for choosing Stellar Windows DATA Recovery 6.0 is its simple interface and features. Anyone can use it easily. Below is the home screen of Stellar Windows DATA Recovery 6.0. You can see how simple it is. There are three categories. The first one is DATA Recovery which has all the recovery tools. The second is Recovery from image, through which you can recover data from system clone image files and Advance Option to apply effective system recovery process. Due to simple interface, it is become easier for anyone to recover data with some clicks. The tool scans your hard drive and looks for deleted files. The same it does for optical media and usb also. It might maintain some kind of hidden cache partition which keeps all your deleted files at one place. Most of the recovery tools work like this only. We will begin with the first category which is DATA Recovery. Lets checkout in short detail each and every section with output.
Drive Recovery:
As the name suggest, this section allows you to recover your entire hard drive in one click. This part has 3 important things. The first one you can Select Volume to Recovery DATA. From here you just need to select the partition. You can recover the entire partition instantly. If you had connected an usb drive or external hard drive, the volume appear in this section only. When you click on that a new menu appear to the right side that offers you 4 common recovery options. They are Quick Recovery (instantly recover all deleted files from selected volume), Deleted Recovery (recover only deleted files), Advance Recovery (recover files from formatted volume by specifying prior file table) and RAW Recovery (recover files on the basis of file extension). So this is the 4 options that you can use to instantly to recover files. When you run a scan, the tool scans for deleted files. You can then choose which files you want to recover. The scanning process takes time depending on the files in your system. The best option to choose here is Deleted Recovery. Once you click on it, you cannot abort the process. Depending on your requirement you can run the type of scan you want. Like if you are want to recover only image files from the entire hard drive, then you can click on RAW Recovery and specify the file types as jpeg.
The second important thing here is Select Hard Drive to Search Lost Volumes. Now this is for those who are having multiple hard drives in their system. Sometime due to power failure or due to OS crash you loss the entire partition. Through this you can recover the entire partition. There are no separate partitions listed. There are hard drives only. You can see the disk is numbered as Disk 0 and Disk 1. To recovery just click on the disk and then there are two recovery options to choose from. Search Lost Volume here reads each and every disk sector. There are further two filters to apply which is Quick and other one Deep. Deep scan goes slowly and take more time in finding out a lost volume. The second option in RAW Recovery that simply offers you files recovered on the basis of file type. It gives you a separate list of JPG, EXE, DOC, etc files.
Re: Stellar Windows DATA Recovery 6.0
CD DVD Recovery:
Now this an easy option to recover data from optical media. It works really well with all type of optical media. I had tested some scratch drive on it. It reminds me of ISOBuster. The tool is capable of recovering files from a damage media also. The recovery here depends on the drive status. Sometime it happens that when you are burning a disc, due to some software problem or OS issue or power failure the drive is half burned. That damages the disc. Through CD DVD Recovery section you can effectively recover files from those drives. And to some extent it works well with scratches also. But if the disc is too old or too damage then it does not works well.
Photo Recovery:
This is a dedicated section for images only. Great for those who have lots of photos in their system. Photos are the only memory we have. And keeping them in digital format is not always safe. This section is very basic. Loaded with only required options. Here you can recover photos on two criteria. The first is searching a specific partition and the second is via searching through partition. When you click on Scan, the result is displayed in the form of photo types. The tool gives you separate folders of bmp, gift, jpg and png files. I think this are the 4 standards only available. There was no option for recovering RAW images. This simple photo recovery section that allows you instantly recover photos from internal and external storage media. Keeping this separate simply means how important this feature is.
Email Recovery:
WE also have an Email Recovery section. This is another important part for professional. This section allows you to recover mail boxes of Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. It is dedicated for these two Email Clients only. While there is no support for msf files used in Thunderbird. This section is only helpful to you if you are having one of those email client installed in your system. To recover just choose the type of email client and then you have two buttons below. Here I found that it helps you to recover your email from damage pst files. You can click on Select PST or DBX to manually select the file or if you are not aware about the location then you can click on Find PST or DBX. By default the email clients use Windows partition as default storage. The recovery here is effective. After testing a few damage files I was able to get some lost emails on it. Most of them were spam.
RAID Recovery:
RAID Recovery allows you to find deleted or lost raid partitions. You can see the options available in the screen shot below. This is a bit advance option for experienced users. There is on auto-detect facility available here. You can only use it when you know everything about raid settings. You can recover from RAID 0, RAID 5 and RAID 6. Mostly based on manual settings, it offers effective options for recovering raid partitions. Compare to other tools this is more simple. You have to properly provide start sectors and other things are manage by the system itself. You can simply BUILD RAID through this. If you are not having any raid partition in your system then you can avoid this section.
[IMG]RAID Recovery allows you to find deleted or lost raid partitions. You can see the options available in the screen shot below. This is a bit advance option for experienced users. There is on auto-detect facility available here. You can only use it when you know everything about raid settings. You can recover from RAID 0, RAID 5 and RAID 6. Mostly based on manual settings, it offers effective options for recovering raid partitions. Compare to other tools this is more simple. You have to properly provide start sectors and other things are manage by the system itself. You can simply BUILD RAID through this. If you are not having any raid partition in your system then you can avoid this section.[/IMG]
File Scanner:
I am going to show the file scanner separately. It is really effective here. It scans the drive instantly and shows all the files in tree format. This time the tool is much faster compare to the old one. There are three screenshot below which shows you the different filter level of File Scanner. The first one is Classic Tree. You can see all the files listed folder wise. When you click on the folder the deleted files from that is listed on the next column and above has a preview part. This preview part gives you the content of any file you select. It shows you from binary code of an exe file to text content of doc and image/video preview. It is a really effective file scanner. The scanning time depends on the number of files. Quick Scan is faster. I really liked the preview part here. Because it allows you to see files before recovering it. And if you are in hurry to go out you can click on Back again and save the scan to run it for the next time.
Re: Stellar Windows DATA Recovery 6.0
File Search
The file scanner also features advance search option which his very important for a recovery tools. After scanning a hard drive there are thousands of files listed. It might be time consuming for you to look on each and every file and recover the one you want. For that you can use the search tab. You can see that in the below image. If you got a really huge file list after drive scanning then you can use this feature to locate the file, you are looking for. The advance section here gives more choices to search via Size and Date filter. This is a bit time saving feature.
Recovery from Image:
This part is effective for those who want to recover important files from system image. Most of the branded system comes with a hidden recovery partition. The tool is capable of scanning that and helps you to recover files through also. If you are using software like Acronis or Norton Ghost and created a complete system clone image file, you can use Windows DATA Recovery to recover files through that. There are minimum options available here. Most of the time it is not really useful. But it can be required when you face any problem with your system. The recovery process works fine with ample of recovery files. I found the same a bit limited in terms of advance recovery. You cannot use this when your system is in critical problem. To use this first you have to create a system image through Advance Options. I had shown that below. This system image file once created is then listed in this section and allows you to recover file.
Advance Options:
This section offers you more advance option to troubleshoot your system in case of problem. Instead of installing a separate system cloning tool you can use this one. Create Image allows you create an image file of the entire partition or hard drive. If the partition size is around 40GB then you get a single 40GB image file. This is a space occupying process. It is simply provided for effective backup. Through Clone Drive, you can simply create a complete clone of the entire hard drive on a different location. You can keep the data on removable hard drive or on an optical media, depending on your need. Cloning of hard drive is effective when you are not sure about the system status. Both the options are basic. Compare to this if we download some third party tool based on the same thing we get more advance options. Stellar Windows DATA Recovery does not provide you any advance backup features. While backup is an important part of many Recovery tools. It is just dedicated to recovery. Here you can create an entire system image or clone the drive. I do not think it is effective to keep a clone image of large partition on your drive. Instead of that there must be a manual selection available. From where you can only backup those files or folders which hare needed.
While other options Drive Status and Remote recovery are somewhat helpful. Drive Status gives you information on the health of your hard drive. This does not fix them. It just scans it and list you information on bad sectors. So that if your drive is about to crash you can backup your data and replace it before time. It just gives you a small visual representation of your hard drive. The information here is a bit limited. I prefer to go with some advance drive scanning tools which would be more effective than this. One good option Stellar Windows DATA Recovery 6.0 offers you is Remote Recovery. You can now recovery our data from remote location.
Re: Stellar Windows DATA Recovery 6.0
Remote Recovery:
To use this you have to keep a Stellar Phoenix Remote Recovery Agent with you. Just install this on the client pc and connect it through Windows DATA Recovery Tool. It works like any other remote desktop app. All you need is the IP address of system where Remote Recovery Agent is installed. Now this is a one stop solution to recover files from multiple pc. There is no need to install Windows DATA Recovery on each and every system on your network. Just install it at a single pc and install Remote Recovery agent in other one. When you launch Remote recovery agent it gives you an IP address of that system. Click on Start Agent. That’s all. Now go back to the pc on which Windows DATA Recovery is installed and type the IP address in it. The click on connect. Your system is now connected to the other one and you can recover the deleted files from remote pc hard drive. Adding this unique feature in the recovery tool, Stellar makes it more effective for those who are having more than one pc. There is no need to purchase a separate license for every system.
Stellar Windows DATA Recovery 6.0 License Comparison:
Conclusion
DATA loss can occur with anyone at anytime. Keeping DATA Loss Prevention software in your pc will cost you minimal. Stellar Windows DATA Recovery 6.0 gives effective protection against data loss. There is less to worry here. Loaded with only require feature the tool is very light on system resources. Compared to 5.0, 6.0 offers you improved scan engine for different partition format, email and remote recovery with enhance raid data recovery support. So if you are still using the old one this is the time to go for upgrades. The cost of this software is $49 for Home, $99 for Pro and $299 for Technician Edition. Which is worth enough for keeping your data secure from different type of losses. It comes with non transferable license. That means once you install and register it on one pc, you cannot remove and install it on other.
Pros
- Simple Interface
- Remote Recovery
- Enhanced File Scan Engine
- Raid Recovery
Cons
- No Advance Backup Solution
- Non Transferable License
