Stellar Data Recovery

Overview

Data recovery software is the thing nobody thinks about until the afternoon they need it very badly. Stellar covers the whole range of that afternoon: a file deleted past the recycle bin, a partition that formatted itself during an install, a drive that mounts as raw and asks to be formatted, a card that a camera declared empty, and a system that will not boot at all. The scan engine reads the volume at the sector level and rebuilds what the file system has forgotten.

This build carries all three editions in one installer. Professional does file and partition recovery on internal and external drives. Premium adds photo and video repair for corrupted media files, which is a separate problem from recovery and one that catches a lot of people out. Technician adds RAID reconstruction and the ability to work against virtual disk images. All three are unlocked here, so there is no preview only mode where the program shows you your files and then asks for money to write them out.

What the scan actually does

The quick scan reads the file system records and rebuilds entries that were marked deleted but not yet overwritten. It is fast, often under a minute, and it is the right first move because a recently deleted file usually comes back with its name and folder intact.

The deep scan ignores the file system entirely and walks the volume looking for file signatures. It is slow, hours on a large drive, and it returns files without their original names, sorted by type. This is what recovers a formatted volume or a raw partition, and the results are a lot better than people expect if the drive has not been written to since.

Photo and video repair

Recovery and repair are different jobs. A video file pulled off a card that was removed mid write will be recovered as a file but will not play, because the index at the end of the container was never written. The repair tool rebuilds that index using a known good file from the same camera as a reference, which is the trick that makes it work.

Photo repair covers truncated JPEGs, corrupted raw files from the common camera makers, and thumbnails extracted from files that are too far gone to fix. It will preview what it can salvage before writing anything, so you know what you are getting.

Drives that will not boot or mount

The bootable media builder writes a recovery environment to a USB stick, which lets you scan a system drive on a machine that will not start. This is the correct approach when the failing drive is the one Windows lives on, because running recovery from inside that installation is writing to the volume you are trying to recover.

For drives with bad sectors the program creates a sector by sector image first and then scans the image rather than the failing hardware. That is the single most important habit in recovery work: get one clean read off the dying drive and do all the searching against the copy. Technician mode extends this to RAID sets, rebuilding a stripe from member disks or images when the controller has given up.

Before you start

Stop using the drive. Every write reduces what can be recovered, and installing recovery software onto the affected volume is the most common way people destroy the files they were trying to save. Install to a different drive, and always recover to a different drive than the one you are scanning.

Scan results can be saved and reloaded, so a deep scan that took six hours does not have to be repeated if you close the program. Preview works on most file types before recovery, which lets you confirm that a found file is the one you want before spending the time writing out a large set.

What you get

• Quick scan for recently deleted files with names and paths intact
• Deep signature scan for formatted, raw or lost volumes
• Lost partition search and recovery
• Photo repair for truncated JPEG and corrupted camera raw files
• Video repair using a reference file from the same device
• Bootable USB recovery environment for unbootable systems
• Sector by sector drive imaging with bad sector handling
• RAID 0, 5 and 6 reconstruction in Technician mode
• Scan results saved and reloaded without rescanning
• Preview before recovery for most file types

Inside the archive

• Stellar Data Recovery installer with all three editions unlocked
• Bootable media builder component
• Drive imaging module
• Interface language packs
• Readme with the recover to a different drive warning spelled out

System requirements

Installing it

1. Install to a drive other than the one you need to recover from. This is not optional advice.
2. Turn off real time protection before running setup.
3. Run setup as administrator and finish the install.
4. Launch the program and choose what to look for and where before starting a scan.
5. Always set the recovery destination to a different physical drive than the source.

Mirrors

Release history

Questions about this release

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