What is the best data recovery software in 2026?

Disk Drill, made by CleverFiles, is the tool recovery-forum reviewers most often put first, for a simple reason: you understand what to do right away. Pick the drive, run the scan, filter by type (photos, videos, documents) and preview each file before you decide.

The free Basic version scans and previews everything it finds. On Windows it recovers up to 500 MB. That's enough for a folder of documents or a few dozen photos, not a full SD card of video. Basic also includes Recovery Vault, which keeps track of deleted files from the moment you turn it on: set it up afterwards, for next time.

Two ways to pay. PRO costs $89 for one year and auto-renews, but you can cancel and the license stays active until the period ends. The lifetime license costs $149 (shown struck through at $239) with lifetime updates. Both cover one user and three devices, Mac and Windows mixed, and commercial use is allowed.

The catch: purchases aren't refundable unless the law requires it. Disk Drill is also less deep than R-Studio or DMDE on technical cases such as damaged RAID arrays or rare file systems.

Tip: run the free scan first and check the preview. If a file opens properly in preview, it will very likely come back intact. If it doesn't, don't pay yet: try another scan mode or another tool.

DMDE flies under the radar, but repair technicians on forums name it again and again, often as "the best free one." It doesn't have Disk Drill's polish. It gives a lot away instead.

The free edition recovers up to 4,000 files from whichever folder you pick, and you can repeat that on another folder as many times as you like. The real restriction: no whole-folder recovery in one go. It also includes what rivals charge for: disk imaging and cloning, a RAID builder and a disk editor.

Licenses are the cheapest here. Express is $20 for one year, personal use. Standard is $48, perpetual, with lifetime updates, and it allows business use for your own company's needs. Professional is $95 for one OS family (Windows, or Linux, or macOS) or $133 for all. One license covers one PC, and the OS family locks at first activation, so choose before you activate.

The catch: the interface. The wording is technical, the menus are dense, and a wrong move in the disk editor can do damage. Don't hand it to someone who's panicking.

Tip: on a fragile drive that still shows up, use DMDE's free imaging first to copy the drive to another disk, then recover from that copy. The original drive only has to work once.

R-Studio, from R-Tools Technology, is the technicians' reference. On repair forums it keeps coming up as the best tool for the job. It rebuilds RAID arrays, reads a long list of file systems, recovers from a remote machine over the network, and works from a disk image instead of the failing drive.

Licenses are permanent and split by need. R-Studio FAT ($49.99) only reads FAT file systems, the ones on USB sticks and SD cards. R-Studio NTFS ($59.99) adds Windows drives. The full Windows version is $79.99. Corporate ($179.99) adds network recovery, and Technician ($899.99) is for repair businesses. For a single job, R-Studio T80+ costs about $80 for a time-limited license.

The catch: it's not built for beginners. The screen shows partitions, sectors and file systems, not a friendly "Photos" folder. And there's no real free version for recovering: the demo shows you what the scan finds before you buy.

Tip: buy only the license you need. An SD card or USB stick only needs R-Studio FAT at $49.99. There's no point paying for the full version to rescue a camera card.

EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard is one of the best-known recovery tools and one of the most guided: a few clicks, a scan, a clear file tree. Its free version is the largest of the commercial tools in this ranking, with recovery of up to 2 GB.

Pricing needs a careful look. On EaseUS's European store, Pro for Windows costs €66.69 for one month, €96.69 for a year or €146.69 for life, for one computer. On Mac: €84.95, €114.95 and €154.95. The monthly plan costs nearly as much as the yearly one, and both are subscriptions: check at checkout whether they auto-renew and turn that off right after your recovery. EaseUS advertises a 30-day money-back guarantee.

The catch: opinions are split. Reviewers like the interface but complain about pop-up ads, and online customer reviews are harsh about refunds and renewals. Listed prices also change from page to page and country to country, with struck-through amounts.

Tip: if your files fit under 2 GB, you pay nothing. Sort the preview and tick only what matters (documents, key photos) rather than the whole drive.

Stellar Data Recovery splits its lineup by use case, which helps you pay only for what you need. Standard (€49.99 on its European store) recovers deleted files and formatted drives. Professional (€79.99) adds lost-partition recovery and recovery from a PC that won't boot. Premium (€99.99) adds repair of corrupted photos and videos, useful when files come back but won't open. Technician (€199) and Toolkit (€299) target professionals.

The free version recovers 1 GB, then 2 GB after sharing on social media, with a 100 MB cap per file. Comfortable for photos. Not for a 3 GB wedding video.

The catch: the pricing page doesn't clearly say whether licenses are yearly or lifetime. Ask before you pay, and note the end date if it's a subscription. Stellar is also less sharp than R-Studio on RAID.

Tip: if files are found but show gray blocks or won't play, don't buy another recovery tool. That's file corruption, which is exactly what Premium adds.

PhotoRec and TestDisk are two open-source tools from the same project: free, no size cap, on Windows, Linux, macOS and BSD. They do two different jobs, and mixing them up is the most common mistake.

TestDisk repairs partitions: it finds a missing partition and rewrites the drive's partition table. That means it writes to the drive, so you need to know what you're doing. PhotoRec only reads: it scans the drive for file signatures (photos, videos, documents) and copies what it finds somewhere else. Forums are full of drives that went RAW, that TestDisk couldn't fix, and that PhotoRec still pulled files from.

The catch: PhotoRec loses file names and folders. You get thousands of files named by number, to sort by hand. Fragmented files, common on a nearly full drive, often come out damaged, and some users see videos saved with the wrong extension. The interface is text only, keyboard driven.

Tip: for a camera SD card, PhotoRec is often the best choice, free or not. Photos there are rarely fragmented, and names like IMG_1234 don't matter much. Limit the search to JPG and RAW formats to speed it up.

Recuva, from the makers of CCleaner, is often the first recovery tool people find, and it tops many download directories. The free version has no size cap and the workflow fits in three moves: pick the drive, scan, tick the files to save.

For a recent deletion on a lightly used drive, it does the job. Technicians still mention it as a sensible free first step for yesterday's mistake, as long as you don't ask more of it.

The catch: it hasn't seen much development in years, Windows 11 isn't officially supported, and it recognizes fewer file types than newer tools. On a formatted drive or a lost partition, it's well behind Disk Drill, DMDE or PhotoRec.

Tip: install it on a different drive from the one holding your deleted files, an external disk for example. Installing on the drive you're recovering can overwrite exactly what you're looking for.

Windows File Recovery is Microsoft's free tool, installed from the Microsoft Store. It runs on Windows 10 (build 19041 and later) and Windows 11. There's no window: everything happens on the command line with the winfr command.

It has two main modes. Regular handles recent deletions on a healthy NTFS drive. Extensive digs deeper, for a formatted or damaged drive or a file deleted long ago. Two older modes, Segment and Signature, are also available.

The catch: the command line puts most people off, and one typo costs time. The destination must be a different drive from the source, which is a good rule anyway. Microsoft makes no promise on an SSD with TRIM enabled.

Tip: target the file type in your command (say, the .docx files in one folder) rather than recovering everything. You'll get results faster and skip thousands of useless files.