Imagine you come home one day, from work or school, and all you want to do is relax, chill, maybe watch some videos you’ve saved on your external hard drive, only to plug it into the computer and find something’s wrong. Perhaps there was an error with a partition and it changes, completely relinquishing your right to access your hard drive. This happens so often and it is truly terrifying, especially if it’s 2 terabytes or more and has all your things on it. 
Your next step would be to google how to fix it, and quite often you run into dead ends as not everyone has the same drive or problem. You could be searching for weeks. Who knows? And then when that fails, you could find yourself in need of some real help. That’s what Data Recovery Software is for! It’s quick, simple and a bit easy to use. I say “a bit” because there is a little bit of a learning curve that you have to get used to (there’s a ton of new terms you’ve probably never heard of, that you’ll need to understand to use some of the functions properly.
So, which Data Recovery Software should you go for? Well, there a quite a few options to choose from, and they’re all free, so let’s go ahead and check out them out, so you can decide which works best for you.
- EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard – This one has a pretty astounding and thorough Deep Scan feature that pretty much guarantees your files are safe
- Recuva – Known to be unbeatable and extremely efficient. You can recover almost any type of lost file, including newly formatted files or damaged files. The interface is also pretty easy to use and has the most advanced file scanning feature.
- TestDisk – Of course, this had to be included, no list with this topic would be legitimate without including TestDisk. It permits you to recover or rebuild the boot sector of your hard drive.
- Undelete 360 – This one was a built on an amazing algorithm which allows us to undelete files. You can recover files that belong to most codecs. It also works on digital cameras and a bunch of other devices (USB’s as well).
- Pandora Recovery – Pretty similar to the previous products, however, this one allows you to do a Surface Scan, which also you to recover hidden files, as well as recover files from formatted hard drives.
- WiseData Recovery – This one is notable for being the fasted option, except it lacks a deep scan option, which sets it back a little.
- PhotoRec – A pretty incredible piece of software that hits all the high notes. It even has an “unformat function” which is just beautiful.
- MiniTool Partition Recovery – This one helps by recovering an entire partition, not just a few files, which makes it worthy of this list.
- Puran File Recovery – There are three modes to this: Default Quick Scan; Deep Scan; Full Scan. It also has an option that allows you to find all lost files.
- PC Inspector File Recover – A pretty standard piece of software with just about everything you’d expect, minus a user-friendly interface.