Stellar Data Recovery

About Stellar Data Recovery

Recovery software is judged on one thing: whether the file comes back. This package runs two passes, a quick scan that reads the file system records for entries marked deleted, and a deep scan that ignores the file system entirely and rebuilds files from signatures across the raw sectors. The deep scan is slow and it is the one that works after a format or a partition table loss.

The three editions are all present in the same build. Professional handles deleted files, formatted drives and lost partitions on ordinary volumes. Premium adds photo and video repair for footage that copies but will not play, and file repair for damaged office documents. Technician adds RAID reconstruction across common array levels and recovery from virtual disk images, which is the edition anyone doing this for other people needs.

Everything reads rather than writes. Scans run against a source volume without modifying it, and a failing drive can be imaged sector by sector first so that all further work happens against the image instead of the dying hardware. That single habit is the difference between one recovery attempt and several.

The results view is where the time is actually saved. Recovered files appear in a tree with previews, filtered by type, size or recovery confidence, and a scan can be saved and resumed later rather than repeated. Selecting only what matters keeps the write pass short, and the destination is forced onto a different volume so nothing overwrites the data still being read.

What is included in this build

• Quick scan of file system records plus a deep signature scan of raw sectors
• Recovery from deleted files, formatted volumes, lost partitions and RAW drives
• Photo and video repair for media that copies but will not play
• Office document repair for damaged spreadsheets, documents and presentations
• RAID reconstruction across common array levels in the Technician edition
• Sector by sector drive imaging so work continues against the image, not the failing disk
• Preview before recovery with filtering by file type, size and confidence
• Saved scan sessions that resume later instead of rescanning from the start

Changed in version 12.6.0.0

• Faster deep scan throughput on large capacity drives
• Additional file signatures added to the raw recovery set
• Improved video repair success on fragmented recordings
• RAID parameter detection made more reliable on unknown arrays
• Reduced memory use when a scan returns very large result sets

Installation walkthrough

These steps assume a clean machine. If a previous release of the same application is present, deal with that first, since an overlapping install is the most common cause of a setup that stops halfway.

1. Do not install onto the drive you intend to recover from. Use a different volume.
2. Stop using the affected drive immediately, since continued writes overwrite recoverable data.
3. Extract the archive and run setup as administrator.
4. Image the failing drive first if the hardware sounds or behaves abnormally.
5. Choose a recovery destination on a separate physical drive before starting the write pass.

System requirements and file details

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