Whether we like it or not, a big chunk of our modern life is digital. We all have hundreds of important files, whether photos, documents, or projects. But it’s also a bit unnerving just how easily those files can vanish, whether due to accidental deletion, system crashes, or hardware failures. We’ve had this happen more than once. We’ve lost hours of work and irreplaceable memories, and I’ve learned an important lesson: a data recovery tool is good insurance.
Sure, you may never need it. But if you do lose something, the ability to retrieve lost data provides not only peace of mind but also a safety net against unforeseen disasters. This is our experience with Stellar Data Recovery.
Installation Process
Installing Stellar Data Recovery for Windows was straightforward. I downloaded the installer from the official Stellar website and ran it on my Windows 10 laptop. I accepted the license agreement, clicked “Next” a few times, and went to get a cup of water. By the time I was back, the software was installed and ready to launch. There were no unwanted bundled programs or surprises during setup, which I appreciated. The software also didn’t take up a lot of computer space.
Stellar Data Recovery isn’t very demanding by modern standards. When I ran a scan (we’ll get there in a moment), it warned me I should turn off some of the software I’m running as I didn’t have enough RAM. I didn’t, and it worked fine (the computer has 32 GB RAM, for reference). As long as you have a fairly recent Windows PC and sufficient storage for recovery, Stellar Data Recovery should run without issues.
The interface
I was greeted by a clean, modern interface. The design is simple and intuitive, which is good news. I’m not a fan of cluttered tools, and Stellar’s UI is quite minimalistic. It starts with a step-by-step approach: first, it asks “What to Recover” – you can tick categories like Documents, Photos, Videos, Audio, or just select “All Data”. This is a very useful feature: if you just care about recovering your photos or your documents, you can move much faster and just focus on those.
Next, it asks “Where to Recover From” – presenting a list of drives, partitions, and even specific folders or locations (like Desktop or Documents). Again, this is pretty simple to follow and the workflow is very user-friendly. Even someone with little technical experience could follow these steps without confusion.
I had Stellar scan my entire hard drive for all the files it could find. Let the software find anything it can.
If you do a deep search, this can take extra time. You may have to leave it running for a bit. It can be slow, especially if you’re scanning a large hard drive with a lot of files. During scanning, the software displays a progress bar and the status of files found. Once a scan is complete, the interface switches to a results view. Here, you can browse recoverable files in a tree structure by their original location or switch to a file-type view (grouping files by type).
I was not expecting what followed, however. Turns out that I’ve deleted around 2 million files and 451 GB of data.
Data Recovery
Stellar can’t save files on the same partition, so if you have just one partition on your computer, you’ll need an external hard drive or some other partition to recover.
When it comes to efficiency, I did observe that the Deep Scan tends to find everything possible – including fragments. This can be a bit confusing at first. After the deep scan, the results contained not only my intact files, but also a lot of duplicates or file fragments that were essentially garbage data. This is common in data recovery (especially if the file system was badly corrupted), but it means the user has to sift through some noise to get to the actual good files. For example, I saw multiple copies of what appeared to be the same file or unnamed files of zero byte size. At the end of the day, it’s better to find too much than not enough. It can take a bit of sifting through to understand what you’re recovering, but if you know what you’re looking for, it shouldn’t be an issue.
Meanwhile, a quick scan on a 500 GB drive finished much faster (under an hour) but found far fewer files.
The ultimate question: did Stellar Data Recovery actually recover my files? Yes – for the most part, it did, and it’s pretty impressive. After the marathon scanning session, I proceeded to recover the data. I selected the most important folders (which the deep scan thankfully reconstructed – it recognized my original directory structure and filenames for a large chunk of the data, since the drive’s file table was partially intact). For some portions of the drive that were more corrupted, it had a folder like “Lost” or file type folders where files were named by type (e.g., all JPEGs in one folder with generic names). That’s typical when raw recovery is needed. I ended up recovering about a metric ton of files onto my prepared external drive.
I’d estimate over 90% of the files I truly cared about came back intact. All my documents (Word, Excel, PDFs) opened without issue. My collection of previously deleted photos (tens of thousands of JPEG and RAW images) was accessible.
Video files were hit or miss. Most of them were fine, including a strange dark video I still don’t remember why I recorded. However, a few of the larger videos wouldn’t play or had glitches. So I got to try one of Stellar’s notable extra features: the video (and photo) repair tool available in the Premium edition. The repair function can fix some videos; others were too far gone and remained unplayable. Still, that feature gave me a second chance at salvaging files that were recovered but damaged, which is a nice bonus.
It wasn’t a perfect sweep – as noted, a small fraction of files were either corrupted, incomplete, or incorrectly reconstructed. Some files were duplicates, and some files were gibberish.
The one other thing I’d note is file type compatibility during recovery. Stellar Data Recovery claims to support hundreds of file types, from common ones to various camera RAW images, videos, archives, etc. From what I could tell, it recognized every standard format I threw at it: JPG, PNG, DOCX, XLSX, PST (Outlook data), PDF, MP4, MOV, MP3, ZIP, and more. I didn’t have any very obscure file types in my data set, but nothing common was missing. Other independent tests have shown the software handles most common file types well (e.g., images, Office docs, popular video codecs) but can struggle with some less common or newer formats.
Some Notable Features
- Quick Scan and Deep Scan: As described, you can run a fast scan for recent deletions or a deep scan for more thorough recovery. The software automatically starts with a quick scan and then prompts you to run a deep scan if needed (for example, if it doesn’t find what you want initially). This two-tier approach is nice, so you don’t always waste time on a deep scan if it’s not necessary.
- Filtered Scans by File Type: At the start, when choosing “What to Recover,” I could limit the scan to certain file types (say, only photos and videos). This can speed up scanning if you know exactly what you’re after.
- Photo/Video Repair: Included in the Premium (and above) tier, this feature allows you to fix corrupted photos or videos. I successfully repaired a corrupted MP4 video that wouldn’t play after recovery – the tool analyzed it and output a working file. It doesn’t always succeed (another video was too far gone), but having this built-in meant I didn’t have to buy a separate repair tool. It’s great for anyone recovering multimedia files that might have been damaged.
- File Preview: The ability to preview files before recovering them is very handy. I used this to verify the integrity of photos and documents. For images, it shows a thumbnail or full preview; for text, it can display the text content; and for videos, it attempts to play them. This helps to avoid recovering garbage files unnecessarily. Just be aware that previewing a very large or corrupted file might not work perfectly every time.
Pricing and Editions
Stellar Data Recovery is available in multiple editions with a subscription-based model. It works on Windows and on Mac (see our previous review here). I very much appreciate that there’s a free version as well. Even though this only lets you recover up to 1 GB of data, if you’re in a pickle for deleting a report or something like that, it can work. This seems to work just fine as well. It has all the basic features (including preview and even deep scan), but you can’t exceed 1 GB of recovered data without upgrading.
Standard – $59.99 per year: Can recover unlimited data (no 1GB cap) from Windows drives for deleted files, formatted disks, etc. It covers documents, photos, videos, etc., from normal storage devices. However, it does not include advanced features like lost partition recovery or unbootable system recovery.
Professional – $89.99 per year: Includes everything in Standard, plus the ability to recover from lost or deleted partitions and from crashed/unbootable systems.
Premium – $99.99 per year: all Professional features and adds the Photo and Video Repair tools. Premium is great if you have multimedia files that might need repairing after recovery. The small price jump from Professional is noteworthy.
These are for individual use. There are other enterprise licenses as well.
A big consideration with Stellar is that these are subscription prices for 1 year of use. There is also a lifetime license for personal use. The pricing is on the higher side of the market, especially if compared to other tools that might offer a lifetime license for similar amounts. On the positive side, Stellar does let you download and scan for free, so you can make sure it finds your lost files before you commit to buying a license.
The Bottom Line
From my experience, Stellar Data Recovery for Windows is a comprehensive and reliable data recovery solution. It offers a user-friendly interface that even beginners can navigate, and it supports recovering data from a wide range of scenarios (accidental deletions, formatting, lost partitions, etc.) and storage media.
Most importantly, it gets the job done. Stellar performed admirably when put to the test with an enormous data loss situation – it recovered 451 GB of files from years ago. I’d recommend it for recovering files.
However, it is not without drawbacks. You need to have a separate partition to recover your files, and the deep scans can take a lot of time. Additionally, while I personally had a successful run, recovery results can vary – not everyone gets 100% of their files back, and some formats might not recover perfectly. This is true of any data recovery software, so it’s always a bit of a gamble.
