Stellar Data Recovery Review

What Is Stellar Data Recovery?

Stellar Data Recovery is a popular name in the data backup world. It used to be known as Stellar Phoenix, Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery, or Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery. Still, the software rebranded to Stellar Data Recovery a few years ago.

Our Stellar Data Recovery review focuses on many aspects of this software, especially its data recovery capabilities. In short, this is a great tool if you want to retrieve lost or unavailable files such as documents, images, or videos. While many features are well designed and work flawlessly, we did found some limitations that can be improved in the future.

Stellar Data Recovery Features

Stellar Data Recovery is a top data recovery tool available on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Its powerful features give you great performance and recovery of your files across different drives and locations. While most Stellar Data Recovery reviews only include the main feature, we’d like to look at all this software has to offer:

Many File Formats

If your device is physically damaged or your data was accidentally deleted, Stellar Data Recovery is there to save you. You can recover almost any file format, including documents, photos, and videos.

Bootable Recovery Media

This feature lets you restore data from crashed operating systems. It creates a bootable USB recovery media to start up your crashed computer, accesses its storage drive, and recover lost data. This only comes with the paid variants of the software, like Stellar Data Recovery Professional.

Corrupted Photo Repair

The Stellar File Repair Toolkit can fix damaged image files. Whether the images are distorted, grainy, blurry, pixelated, or grayed out, the software works wonders.

Corrupted Video Repair

Corrupted video files captured with all major brands and types of camera devices can also be repaired with Stellar Recovery, even in 4K, 8K, and VR video.

Recovery From Corrupt, Lost, or Missing Partition

Corrupted partitions often require reformatting before allowing you to access them. With the Stellar data recovery toolkit, you can recover the files before doing so.

Any data from APFS, NTFS, FAT, exFAT, HFS, HFS+, Ext2, Ext3, or Ext4 partitions can be retrieved. In addition to this, the software can discover lost or deleted partitions on a storage drive with its “Can’t Find Drive” option and Deep Scan ability.

Recovery From Crashed Systems

As one of the best hard disk recovery software programs, Stellar creates bootable media to access and recover your data from any crashed or unbootable Windows PC or Mac. So, even if your computer crashed, Stellar will scan your hard drive or start-up disk to locate and recover the data.

Encrypted Drive Recovery

Stellar Data Recovery for Mac and Windows can also recover data from BitLocker® encrypted drive.

Advanced RAID Recovery

With the Toolkit, you can reconstruct inaccessible RAID arrays by using parameters such as disk order, start sector, and block size. There is support for anything from RAID 0 to RAID 5 and RAID 6 with seamless data recovery.

Stellar Data Recovery works with both non-bootable and encrypted files. RAID and virtual drive recovery are supported, and the tool can repair corrupted photos or videos quickly.

Cloning

We greatly enjoyed the cloning feature, which lets you duplicate a disk to another drive. This is very useful when you need a copy of a failing drive before it deteriorates. While the previous version (Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery) worked well, the new one sees many improvements.

On top of that, the software supports virtual drive recovery, can recover from 4K drives, and has dual monitor support.

That concludes the most prominent features of Stellar Data Recovery. Let’s now look at what else this software has got to offer.

Stellar Data Recovery Speed

In this part of our Stellar Data Recovery review, we’re putting this top recovery software’s speed to the test. Our performance tests inspected some of the most-used aspects of this tool. We tested the software for:

• Speed of scanning lost/deleted files
• Speed of file recovery
• Efficiency in file recovery
• Efficiency in file names

As many Stellar Data Recovery reviews praise the software for its speeds, we were excited to test it for ourselves. We deleted images, videos, and documents to retrieve them to our SSD drive using the software.

With 15GB of deleted files, it took the software around 45 minutes with the deep scan. Stellar Data Recovery software scored very well on this front, as it’s very fast for software of this type.

We also tried hard disk drives and a USB flash drive. We managed to recover 10 GB of files from an HDD in only 15 minutes. On the USB drive, the speed was slower at around 25 minutes for 8 GB, but still quite impressive. Our second test recovered 1TB from an HDD in two hours.

When testing the efficiency in file recovery and supported file names, we found out that Stellar Recovery can “read” files from ZIP archives. You can be 100% sure of retrieving the contents of any compressed file. 

The quick scan was only able to recover the files and folders we recently deleted. Anything beyond this hard reformat was lost and only recoverable through the deep scan option.

Interface and Ease of Use

The software’s home screen is clean to look at, displaying seven main tabs, including:

• Office Documents
• Folders
• Emails
• Photos
• Audio
• Videos
• All Data

We didn’t experience any issues navigating the interface, as it was user-friendly and well organized. Even though most of the processes are quite technical, they aren’t hard to understand.

Unfortunately, we did find a lack of customization options. It would’ve been great to see the ability to scan by file name or type, to minimize the scanning time.

System Requirements

• Operating System - Windows 11, 10, 8.1, 8 & 7 & macOS Ventura 13, Monterey 12, Big Sur 11, Catalina 10.15, 10.14, 10.13, 10.12 & 10.11
• Memory - 4 GB minimum (8 GB recommended)
• Hard Disk - Minimum 250 MB free space

Customer Support

With many other Stellar Data Recovery reviews backing up its customer support, this software has a solid reputation. There is a large library which answers most of your questions. For more complex issues, you can contact the help desk, which operates 24 hours a day on business days.

We contacted them about a review of the partition recovery and the deep scan features. It took less than 4 minutes before a customer representative came back to us. We continued our discussion over email, where they sent detailed instructions on how to solve the issue.

Telephone and email support also provide you with quick replies, helping you fix issues within minutes.

Stellar Data Recovery Cost

Stellar Data Recovery for Windows and Mac has a free plan which you can use for 1GB of data and files of up to 25MB. If you require more features, you can upgrade to one of the paid plans:

Stellar Data Recovery Review - Verdict

The new version of the Stellar Data Recovery software works much better than its predecessor. ZIP files and slow scans are a thing of the past. With the new version, you can be sure of recovering all files from any of your disks. Some users claimed that they were even able to do full Stellar Phoenix database recovery in the updated program.

Our performance tests showed that this hard drive recovery software is fast, and the pricing is transparent. Stellar keeps its reputation as one of the few programs that can quickly restore damaged and/or corrupt files, inconsistent operating systems, problematic computers, or common blue screen and system failure scenarios.