Recover lost or deleted data with ease - Stellar Data Recovery software review
All of us generate data in all walks of our life. Be it files, folders, photos, audios or videos, data is present in each gadget we possess - laptop, desktop, hard drives, memory cards, mobile phones, iPod, etc. With advancements in technology, there are several ways we can use to store and secure the data. But no storage device is 100% reliable. It's threatening to lose our data either by accidentally deleting or by corruption or damage of the gadgets. While we always knew the importance of backing up our data, we recently learnt the need to have data recovery software. In this article we walk you through our experience of losing important data, finding a saviour in a data recovery software named Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Software and how easily it restored our data and peace of mind.
Being travel bloggers and photographers, you already know that we travel extensively and make a lot of memories in each place. These memories are captured in the videos and photographs that we click. It is completely normal for us to come back from a week-long trip with more than 100 GB of photographs and videos in our several memory cards. We, in fact, always travel with at least three 64 GB memory cards and few smaller sized ones that go into our DSLR and GoPro. We also ensure our mobiles have enough free space before travelling. We also have a thorough backing up process which we can share in a detailed article separately. To give you a brief idea, once we have edited and shortlisted all photos and videos which we would like to store, we keep 2 copies of originals in 2 separate hard drives and one copy on cloud.
If you have been following our work, you would have read our recently concluded travel blog series about North Eastern state of India - The Meghalaya Odyssey. What you would not know that after a 9-day tour of Meghalaya, we were devastated to find out that we lost most of the data as two of our memory cards went corrupt. To a traveller, nothing can be more maddening than this. 8-9 days of our efforts in clicking precious memories, beautiful landscapes, information collection, interviewing people, delving in the culture – all went in vain in just a matter of few minutes when we discovered that we had lost all our data. To us, it was like losing all the money that we had spent on the trip. As you would realize, all of this happened before we could even transfer any of the data to our laptops and back it up. We have previously experienced corruption of a 1TB hard disk, but that just had movies which we could download again. This time we were completely shattered.
After an extensive study of all the tip and tricks to bring back our data, we realized a few important things that we hardly knew before. Data loss can be due to lots of reasons like accidental deletion, virus attack, hard drive failure, system crash, careless formatting, dropping the storage device & damaging it and many more. The more you fiddle with your crashed hard drive or corrupted memory cards, less are the chances of the data recovery.
We soon realized that we needed some professional help. There are several data recovery softwares that are available out there in the market that claim to restore our lost data. We often assume that our data is gone once we have deleted files from our operating system, hard drives, pen-drives or memory cards and then emptied the recycle bin of its contents. Surprisingly, that is not the case. If any of your files are accidentally deleted, you can just scan your drive by a data recovery software, identify the files that you want to restore and undelete it. Isn’t that amazing!!?
Any storage device stores data in different sectors. Various reasons could lead to un-usability of specific sector eventually resulting in the creation of bad sectors causing the storage device to crash, corrupt or get damaged. In such cases, you can securely use a data recovery tool that can remove the bad sectors and restore most of the data.
Another problem was identifying the right data recovery software. After a lot of research, we finally zeroed down on one - Stellar data recovery software.
Stellar is a pretty experienced data recovery service provider serving its customers to recover their lost data since the past 25 years. It is India’s first data recovery service company founded in 1993 and is the only ISO 9001:2015 & ISO 27001:2013 certified organisation in India. We were satisfied after reading all the fabulous reviews of the Stellar data recovery software by people and companies across the globe and we decided to give it a shot. No matter what type of data is lost, Stellar data recovery software claims to recover lost data in simple steps. This particular software can recover data from corrupted hard drives (internal/ external), memory cards, pen drives, SD cards, SSD cards etc. Also print magazines such as PC magazine, Techradar, PC Quest had already rated the software highly pushing us to go for it.
Our only apprehension was that we had no idea of how the Stellar data recovery software worked and so we reached out to one of the customer care executives to help us out. Our further doubts cleared when a professional from Stellar promised us – ‘No recovery, no charge’ – that means if we do not recover our data there’s a 100% money payback. We were now assured that we wouldn't lose anything by trying out this method and all our files, audios, videos, photos etc. can be restored if this works out; that too in a process that’s not only simple but super-fast as well.
How to use Stellar Data Recovery Software:
We first downloaded the trial version of Stellar data recovery software as suggested by the customer care executive. It can help recover data in 3 simple steps - select media, scan and recover. Up to 1 GB of data can be recovered using the free trial version with a max file size limit for each file being 25 MB. We thought it was a good idea by starting with the free version, scan our memory cards, see what all can be recovered and then upgrade to a paid version if chances of recovery is promising.
Once we installed the free version of the Stellar data recovery software in our Windows laptop, we realised that it is easy to navigate and self-explanatory. The following are the steps that we followed:
1. Firstly, we downloaded, installed and ran the Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery- Free Edition.
2. Now, we selected the type of file that we wanted to recover under ‘Select What to Recover’ option. It could be a photo, an audio, a video, a complete folder, a specific file or an e-mail as you can see in the screenshot below
3. Next, we chose the desired location under ‘Select Location’ from where we wanted to recover our deleted data. We inserted our memory card in the slot of our laptop and selected its location in the drive section. (Snapshot below is an example)
4. The scan started once we clicked the ‘Scan Button’. Soon a list of files that can be recovered were shown under ‘File Type'. Here, we were glad to see all our photos and videos on the list. We jumped with joy (Snapshot below is an example)
5. We then selected some of the files that we wanted to recover and clicked 'Recover Button'
6. A pop-up window appeared asking for the 'Destination Location'. We chose to restore everything in our laptop's hard drive and clicked 'Next'. And voila, our photos and videos started getting restored in the destination that we chose.
We knew that the trial version can only recover data up to 1GB and our lost files were more than 100GB. Without further delay, we upgraded to Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery – Home that allows recovering unlimited data. We recovered all our seemingly lost photos and videos from both the corrupted memory cards.
We could easily tag Stellar data recovery software as a ‘Do It Yourself’ to recover lost data. We are highly indebted to them for bringing back our lost memories. The professional service offered by the customer care executive of Stellar was exceptional. We highly recommend using Stellar Windows data recovery software to restore or undelete lost data.
The best feature of this software is that it is 100% secure. On downloading software, we allow complete access of our device (laptop/ desktop) to the software. There’s always a threat that the data might be misused or a virus might invade the computer. Stellar data recovery software works best as it provides complete privacy and guaranteed security.
Another great feature of Stellar we learnt is that it has 15 offices across India with Class 100 Clean room labs. In layman terms, Class 100 clean room basically means an extremely clean room with very little dust particle and controlled humidity and temperature. This ensures no further damage to the crashed hard drive and ensures maximum possible data recovery. One can just remove the damaged/ corrupted hard drive from their laptop/ desktop by following instructions of the tutorial that Stellar Data recovery company provides, safely package it and courier it to one of the nearest Stellar labs for data recovery.
Having been through a near ordeal, we are now rest assured that any untoward happening with our storage devices will be well taken care of by Stellar. Even you can benefit by using this software to recover your lost data with ease. You can check out the Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Software here.
Have you at any point of time lost your data? What did you do to recover it? What are your thoughts on the Stellar data recovery software? Do let us know in the comment section below.
