The interface

The user interface of Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Professional software is intuitive and easy to use. While data recovery is an advanced job, with this software, even a novice will be able to recover the data on their own without requiring any expert help. The main interface gives you three recovery options:

Drive RecoveryCD/DVD RecoveryPhoto Recovery

If you click on the “Drive Recovery” option, you will get a list of hard disks attached to the system and a list of drives available on each hard disk. Clicking on any drive will bring up a sidebar menu with the following options:

Quick RecoveryDeleted RecoveryAdvanced RecoveryRaw Recovery

Quick Recovery will perform a quick scan of the selected volume (drive). This option is very efficient and will give you almost all the deleted data in a few moments. Quick recovery can be performed on only one drive at a time. You can recover data from existing volumes, lost volumes and even raw drives. Deleted Recovery will list files that were deleted from the media (hard drive or CD/DVD drive). The benefit of this option is that it will only list deleted files. Everything else will be omitted. Advanced Recovery will give you more options than Quick Recovery while essentially doing the same task. If a drive was deleted or corrupted in a different format than the current format, you may want to use the Advanced Recovery option. Supported file systems include FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, exFAT, NTFS and NTFSS. Raw Recovery makes use of file signatures in order to recover data from a raw partition. It will scan every bit of the partition and will try to identify and recover data according to the file signatures available in the software. The CD/DVD Recovery and Photo Recovery options work very similar to the Drive Recovery option but are specialized for UDF file systems and image-only files respectively.

The Recovery Process

Since the Drive Recovery, CD/DVD Recovery and Photo Recovery work in a similar manner, we will only go through the Drive Recovery option. You can follow the same steps for other recoveries.

  1. Open Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Professional software
  2. Select the volume or partition that you want to recover
  3. Select one of the recovery options
  4. If you select the Quick Recovery option, it will start scanning the partition instantly and will display a tree of folders and files that are being retrieved. Please note that it may take some time (even for Quick Recovery) to complete depending upon the partition size and deleted data to be recovered.
  5. After scanning is completed, you will be presented with the recovered folder structure. The interface is just like the list view of Windows Explorer
  6. You can also preview a file by clicking on it. The preview will open the recovered file inside the Stellar Phoenix software. Raw Data Recovery works in a very similar fashion. You have to select Raw Recovery instead of Quick Recovery to start scanning for raw partitions.

Recovering data

When you are done with the scanning task, there are two options available for you to recover the deleted files and folders. Either select each and every file and folder of our choice to recover or create a recovery image of the scanned data so that you may be able to load the same data again instantly and recover files afterwards. When you have completed the scanning process, select the files and folders you want to recover and press the Recover button. This will display the data saving options. You can either recover to a local drive or an FTP location. You can also compress the recovered files by zipping them to save space. I was quite satisfied with the recovery results when I ran the software on a couple of old hard drives. Together with a USB flash drive support, Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Professional is an all-in-one recovery tool giving you all the chances and options to recover your precious data. Stellar Partition Recovery