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While rather obvious from the name, Stellar Data Recovery’s main feature is recovering data in the form of files that may have been deleted, or lost when a partition/drive is overwritten or goes belly up. It supports a wide variety of media and container files: hard drives, SSDs, memory cards, VHDs, optical, etc. But it will also create images of those for later recovery. Obviously, these need to be images with all sectors (marked empty or not) so they’ll be the same size as the drive you’re creating the image from — usually large. Why? Imagine your trying to save/recover data from a hard driv

The program comes in three consumer flavors: the $70 annually/$130 perpetual Standard version, the $100 annually/$200 perpetual Professional version, and the $210 annually/$320 lifetime Premium edition with corrupt photo/video repair. There are also two higher subscription tiers: the $199 Technician, and $299 Toolkit. Only the latter features the VHD, NAS, and Linux/macOS recovery options. Note that these are the full retail prices, which were heavily discounted at the time of this writing. You’ll find a feature comparison on another web page. You may also download a free version of any tier t

Long gone is the rather amateurish, but colorful bit-mapped interface of over a decade ago. The current interface is clean and mostly black and white. Business-like, as a utility should be, one might say. However, said interface is also a bit unusual in that some portions stick out beyond the standard window borders. At first, I wasn’t sure if this was a glitch, but it turns out to be deliberate. It grew on me and is a nice change from the norm. See below. It’s also quite impressive as the bulb-outs act just like they’re a part of the window with no hidden border obscuring other screen element

In my original testing over a decade ago with Stellar Phoenix 6, it did well with hard drives and memory cards, but had a few issues with unknown file types and flash drives. This time around I was more impressed… … because this time around, I’m happy to report that this latest version found every file I’d deleted, formatted, or repartitioned over on local media, though I didn’t throw anything as tough as the Canon headers at it. However, said files did include many without extensions. I tried HDDs, SSDs, microSD cards, and virtual hard drives. The results were so thorough that with the dash c