Handy Recovery Alternatives and Similar Software

Recuva

Recuva (pronounced "recover") is a freeware Windows utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted from your computer. This includes files emptied from the Recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players. It will even bring back files that have been deleted from your iPod, or by bugs, crashes and viruses!

• Bundleware Be careful during installation, the installer will promote you to install CCleaner. See also https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/75155568d64e958d8003f9fbb36839fc9a53bfab3b51a8a1106a78e5be98b2e9/detection

Freemium Windows PortableApps.com

TestDisk

TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.

Free Open Source Mac Windows Linux BSD Haiku

Glary Utilities

Glary Utilities offers numerous powerful and easy-to-use system tools and utilities to fix, speed up, maintain and protect your PC. It provides in 23 languages registry and disk cleaning, startup delay, privacy protection, performance accelerator and amazing multifunctional tools. It can fix dogged registry errors, wipe off clutters, optimize internet speed, safeguard confidential files and maintain maximum performance. It is designed for both novice and professionals.

• Bundleware Be careful during the installation: https://alternativeto.net/discussions/applications/11718/be-careful-in-the-installation/

Freemium Windows Android

PhotoRec

PhotoRec, companion program to TestDisk , is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from Hard Disks and CDRom and lost pictures (thus, its Photo Recovery name) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your medias filesystem has been severely damaged or re-formatted.

Free Open Source Mac Windows Linux BSD

Disk Drill

Disk Drill is a data recovery software that easily protects your files from accidental deletion with Recovery Vault and recovers lost data from disks. Disk Drill supports most of storage drives, file types and file systems.

Freemium Mac Windows

R-Studio

R-Studio is a family of powerful and cost-effective undelete and data recovery software. Empowered by the new unique data recovery technologies, it is the most comprehensive data recovery solution for recovery files from FAT12/16/32/exFAT, NTFS, NTFS5 (created or updated by Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008/Win7), HFS/HFS+ (Macintosh), Little and Big Endian variants of UFS1/UFS2 (FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD/Solaris) and Ext2/Ext3/Ext4 FS (Linux) partitions.

Commercial Mac Windows Linux

GetDataBack

GetDataBack, for FAT or NTFS drive and partitions, will recover your data if the hard drive's partition table, boot record, FAT/MFT or root directory are lost or damaged, data was lost due to a virus attack, the drive was formatted, fdisk has been run, a power failure has caused a system crash, files were lost due to a software failure, files were accidentally deleted. GetDataBack can even recover your data when the drive is no longer recognized by Windows.

Commercial Windows

MiniTool Power Data Recovery

MiniTool Power Data Recovery is all in one data recovery software for both home and business users. It can recover deleted data from Windows Recycle Bin, restore lost data even the partition is formatted or deleted, restore data from corrupted hard drive, virus infection, unexpected system shutdown or software failure. It support IDE, SATA, SCSI, USB hard disk, memory card, USB flash drive, CD/DVD, Blue-Ray Disk, iPod.

Freemium Mac Windows

Lazesoft Recovery Suite

Lazesoft Recovery Suite is a very easy to use ALL-IN-ONE boot disk that repair your crashed Windows, recover data from deleted, formatted, damaged partition, clone or backup disk, reset your forgotten Windows password. Recover your data or repair your system when Windows can't start normally. Create bootable rescue CD or USB disk Boot up any computer Recover data and passwords Repair Windows system Clone or Restore the hard drive Home Edition is free for home user.

Free Personal Windows

DiskGenius

DiskGenius, previously PartitionGuru, is a disk recovery and file recovery system to view partitions and to access data across a number of file systems, including NTFS, ext3 and ext4.

Freemium $ $ $ Windows

Wondershare Data Recovery

Wondershare Data Recovery is a powerful yet easy-to-use Windows data recovery software that can recover your deleted, formatted, lost and inaccessible data from PC, USB drive, external hard drive, mobile phone, digital camera, iPod, MP3/ MP4 player, and other storage media. This cost-effective and non destructive data recovery tool with unique recovery options let you perform data recovery thoroughly. Highlights • Smart Recovery- Retrieve your deleted and lost data just by one- click.

Commercial Mac Windows

ApowerRecover

ApowerRecover can easily get your files back. Whether it is due to accidental deleting, formatting, virus infection and improper actions, you can use ApowerRecover to recover files. It can safely recover deleted files on the Windows PC or Mac, whether they are in the computer hard drive, external hard disk, memory cards, digital cameras, camcorders, or flash drives.

Commercial Mac Windows

Data Rescue

Data Rescue is the best digital data recovery software on the market for recovering files from a problem hard drive or that have been previously deleted. Data Rescue works when other tools fail and is completely safe to use since it does not attempt any risky repairs to the drive its scanning. Data Rescue is the safest, most powerful software for data recovery, used by many data recovery services, law enforcement, all major branches of the U.S. Military and major intelligence agencies.

Commercial Mac Windows

Raise Data Recovery

Raise Data Recovery is designed to help you efficiently restore your lost, formatted or accidentally deleted files from various data storage media: a hard drive of your PC or laptop, external hard drive, thumb drive, memory card of your smartphone, tablet or digital camera, RAID system and many others. While employing extremely powerful mechanisms, similar to those used in professional series, the software is simple enough for anyone to use without spending ages to come to grips with it.

Freemium $ $ $ Windows

PC INSPECTOR File Recovery

PC INSPECTOR File Recovery 4.x is a data recovery program that supports the FAT 12/16/32 and NTFS file systems. Some Features are: 1) Finds partitions automatically, even if the boot sector or FAT has been erased or damaged 2)Recovers files with the original time and date stamp 3)Supports the saving of recovered files on network drives 4)Recovers files, even when a header entry is no longer available. Competition products cannot recover such files.

• Discontinued This software was developed almost 2 decades ago by Alexander Grau. It was then known as DriveRescue. Although still available from Convar, it is now obsolete IMO. It is basically the same and unchanged since release. It does not even request elevation (required to access disks under Windows XP and up) and crashes even on smaller hard disks. Software is also not compatible with any recent Windows versions. See http://pcinspector.de/FileRecovery/faq.htm?po=3

Free Windows

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery (also called Stellar Phoenix File Recovery and Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery for Mac) is a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) hard disk data recovery software to recover deleted or formatted data from hard disk and various other storage media devices like USB, Flash drive, removable media etc.

Commercial Windows

Active@ File Recovery

Active@ File Recovery recovers data as a result of having been accidentally deleted, formatted or otherwise lost, includes a Partition Recovery tool.

Freemium Windows

Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery

Photo recovery utility specially designed to recover formatted, deleted, lost pictures, images, media files from Windows and Mac OS X as well as iPods, USB, digital cameras and memory cards. It supports number of media file formats like SF, MP4, MOV, AVI, M4V, MPEG, 3GP, OGM, DV, MKV, 3G2, DIVX, M4B, ASX, VOB, MTS, MOI and WMV.

Commercial Mac Windows

DMDE

DM Disk Editor and Data Recovery (DMDE) is a disk editor which can help you to understand NTFS. Its capable to view your hard disk sector wise, on MFT level, to disect mft attributes and to edit bytes on your hard disk. Besides NTFS, it can handle other file systems such as FAT. Most functions are available by short cuts and it has a clean gui. Its recommended to use it along with Brian Carriers book about file system forensic.

Freemium Windows

Scrounge NTFS

Data recovery program for NTFS file systems. Reads each block of the hard disk to and retrieves rebuilds file system tree on another partition.

• Discontinued The program is no longer updated. Last version, 0.8.6, released in June 2009, can be still downloaded from the official website.

Free Open Source Windows Linux BSD

Coolmuster Data Recovery

For many people, data losing could be a disaster in the daily life, especially when they're not used to backup files regularly. Now, things can be become more easier once you owned Coolmuster Data Recovery software.

Commercial Mac Windows

Zero Assumption Recovery

Sometimes disaster strikes. Data can be lost due to many different reasons. Accidental reformatting, power spikes, virus attacks and hardware malfunction are some of the scenarios where you will find yourself looking for a data recovery solution. Zero Assumption Recovery provides a suite of highly effective and thorough data recovery software for Microsoft® Windows™ operating systems.

Freemium Windows

Wise Data Recovery

Wise Data Recovery is a free data recovery program to get back deleted photos, documents, videos, emails etc. from your local or removable drives for free. It can get back lost files from hard drive, external hard drive, USB drive, Memory card, digital camera, mobile phone, MP3 player and other storage media. With advanced algorithm, Wise Data Recovery is able to finish the scanning process in seconds, saving you a lot of time.

Free Windows PortableApps.com

Ashampoo HDD Control

Ashampoo HDD Control 2 provides complete monitoring of your hard drive(s). The software supports not only all common IDE and serial ATA hard drive(s), but also provides improved support for external USB hard drives and solid state drives (SSDs).

Commercial Windows

TOKIWA DataRecovery

DataRecovery is freeware and made by TOKIWA to undelete accidentally deleted files even from recycle bin. But DataRecovery doesn't assure that all files deleted can be recovered successfully. It mostly depends on your system/configuration and we can't support each of all those varieties.

• Discontinued The program is no longer updated since August 2013. Last version, v2.4.7, released in November 2012, can be still downloaded for free, with the sourcecode too, from the official website.

Free Open Source Windows