Easeus Data Recovery Wizard Review

Easeus Data Recovery Wizard is a recovery software for Windows that supports file, partition and complete recoveries of data. The software is provided as a free limited version and a commercial professional version. The main limitation of the free version is that you can only recover up to 2 Gigabyte of data while you are not limited in the pro version.

The application reminds the user during installation that it should not be installed on the same drive that data needs to be recovered from. That is a sound advice as the installation could overwrite deleted data which would make it unrecoverable. It is also recommended to have a safe storage device with enough space at hand to store the recovered data on.

This may not be a problem if you need to recover a Word or Excel document that you have deleted accidentally but if you plan on recovering all data on a hard drive (for instance after formatting) or a partition you may need a lot of space.

Easeus Data Recovery Wizard

When you first start Data Recovery Wizard you are presented with three options: Deleted File Recovery, Complete Recovery and Partition Recovery.

Deleted file recovery

This module can be used to recover individual files on the system that have been deleted in the past. Deletion does not necessarily mean user initiated, it can very well mean that a virus or crash has rendered data unreadable.

Users can undelete (it is sometimes called unerase as well) files if the file system is not corrupt or broken. The other available recovery modules are for situations where the file system or a partition were damaged.

Generally speaking, files can be recovered if they have not been overwritten by new data. This means that recovery chances are best for newly deleted files, and increasingly worse for every day the computer has been in use since the files have been deleted.

Easeus Data Recovery Wizard scans the connected drives and displays them in the drive overview. Here it is possible to select a drive for file recovery.

Data Recovery Wizard scans the selected hard drive or storage device and displays its finding on the next screen.

Directories and files are displayed in an explorer-like fashion. A file search offers help if many results have been returned but it is only of use if you remember the file name or at least part of it.

Files are selected with checkmarks. The file recovery software supports file previews (for images and text) which can be handy for supported file types as you may be able to verify right away if the file is intact.

The storage location for all selected files you want to be recovered needs to be configured in the last step. Easeus Data Recovery Wizard recovers the files then and places them in the selected location.

It is then possible to go back to the file listing to recover additional files.

Complete Recovery

Complete recovery has been designed for situations in which the drive is not accessible anymore, for instance after a hard disk crash, accidental formatting or other forms of corruption. The initial screen displays the hard drives again. Users can select a disk image that they want to process instead of one of the connected hard drives.

The selected hard drive or disk image is then scanned by the recovery software. The application searches for files, boot records, partition tables, folders and other information.

A list of partitions is displayed to the user in the end. Each partition is displayed with various information, from storage size to files and folder matches and a suggestion that indicates how likely it is that it is the right partition of the drive. If no partitions are displayed quit the process and start the partition recovery module instead.

Up to four partitions can be selected for recovery in the complete recovery module.

Partition Recovery

Partition Recovery comes into play if the complete recovery module does not find partitions. The recovery process itself is very similar to the previously described process. A list of hard drives are shown and it is up to the user to select one of the drives or a disk image to scan for recoverable partitions.

All partitions that have been found by the scan are displayed in the program interface. Here it is again possible to select partitions for recovery.

Core Features

• Recover deleted or lost files
• Disk recovery after hard drive crashes, accidental formatting
• Recover data from unformatted hard drives
• Recover files if the partition is corrupt, not accessible anymore
• Supports not only hard drives but also USB drives and storage, e.g. digital camera cards.
• Supports FAT12, FAT16, VFAT, FAT32, NTFS/NTFS5 file systems
• Create disk images to assist in the file recovery

Verdict

Easeus Data Recovery Wizard is an easy to use file recovery software for Windows. Its feature set should be sufficient for the majority of file recovery situations that users encounter.

The free and pro versions are nearly identical in functionality.

Apart from the already mentioned 2 Gigabyte recovery limitation, free versions of the program don't ship with boot media that can recover data even if the computer itself does not boot anymore.

That feature is however not available in the regular Pro version as well, but only in the Pro version with bootable media which is more expensive.

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