Best Data Recovery Software in 2026: 10 Tools Tested on Drives We Broke on Purpose

Every “best data recovery software” list I read while researching this one had the same problem: the ranking matched the commission rate almost perfectly. So we did it the slow way. We bought eleven licences with our own money, loaded six identical drives with the same 4,000-file test set, and then wrecked them on purpose — deleted, quick-formatted, full-formatted, corrupted the partition table, and in two cases yanked the USB out mid-write.

Then we scored what came back. Not what each tool claimed to find. What actually opened afterwards, with the right filename, in the right folder.

Short on time? Disk Drill recovered the most across the widest range of scenarios and is where most people should start. EaseUS gives you 2 GB of free recovery, which is more than everyone else and often enough to finish a small job for nothing. PhotoRec is free forever and genuinely good, as long as you can live without your original filenames.

How we ranked these

Seven things, weighted roughly in this order:

1. Recovery rate on our test set. Out of 4,000 known files, how many came back intact and openable? This is 40% of the score by itself.
2. Filename and folder reconstruction. Getting a folder called recovered_files stuffed with f0034521.jpg is technically a recovery, but it is a miserable one. Tools that rebuild the original structure score much higher.
3. File system support. NTFS and exFAT matter most on Windows, APFS and HFS+ on Mac. A tool that can only scan a drive as RAW loses all the metadata.
4. Behaviour on a failing drive. Good software images the drive first and works from the copy. Bad software hammers a dying disk until it dies properly.
5. What the free version actually does. Preview-only is much less useful than a real free allowance.
6. Price relative to results. A $49 tool that recovers 80% beats a $99 tool that recovers 82%.
7. Whether you can figure it out. Nobody is calm during data loss. Confusing software costs people their files.

No vendor saw this article before publication, and nobody paid to be included. We do earn a commission if you buy through our links, which is what keeps the drives and licences funded — but it does not change the order.

1. Disk Drill — the one to try first

Disk Drill won on the boring metric that matters most: it got more files back, more often, in a more usable state than anything else we ran. On the quick-formatted 128 GB exFAT drive it returned 3,712 of 4,000 files with folder structure intact. The next best was EaseUS at 3,404.

What impressed me more than the raw number was the behaviour on the drive we deliberately damaged. Disk Drill noticed the bad sectors, offered to build a byte-for-byte image, and then scanned the image instead of the failing hardware. That is the correct order of operations and it is what a professional would do. Several tools on this page just charged ahead.

The honest downside: the free tier stops at 100 MB of recovery. You can scan the whole drive and preview everything for free, so you will know exactly whether it is worth paying before you pay — but for anything beyond a handful of documents you are buying a licence.

2. EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard — best free allowance by a mile

EaseUS gives you 2 GB of genuinely free recovery. Everyone else caps you at 100 MB or shows you a preview and demands payment. For a person who accidentally emptied the Recycle Bin and wants forty Word documents back, 2 GB means the whole job costs nothing.

Recovery performance sat just behind Disk Drill on NTFS and FAT32 and a little further behind on exFAT. Deep scan was noticeably slower — 51 minutes versus 34 on the same 1 TB drive — but it found comparable results in the end. The interface is the friendliest here; my test was three clicks from launching it to a list of recoverable files.

The upsell prompts in the free version are constant and slightly wearing. That is the trade for a 2 GB allowance, and I would take it.

3. Stellar Data Recovery — when the drive itself is sick

On a healthy drive Stellar is fine but unremarkable. On a drive that has gone RAW, has an unreadable partition table, or is throwing I/O errors, it moves up several places. It handled our deliberately corrupted partition better than anything except R-Studio, and it does the right thing with bad sectors — logs them, skips them, keeps going, rather than retrying until the drive gives up.

Stellar also runs a physical cleanroom lab, which matters for a reason that has nothing to do with software: if the scan tells you the drive is mechanically failing, there is an escalation path that does not involve starting over with a different company.

4. Wondershare Recoverit — the video repair specialist

Recoverit’s general recovery is middling. Its video repair is not. We fed it eleven MP4 and MOV files that had been truncated mid-write and it made nine of them play again. Disk Drill and EaseUS recovered the same broken files faithfully — broken.

If you are a videographer who pulled a card out of a camera while it was still writing, this is the specific problem Recoverit solves better than anyone. If you are recovering documents and photos, there are better options above it.

One caution: it flagged a number of files as recoverable that turned out to be unusable fragments. Preview before you trust the count.

5. Tenorshare 4DDiG — the easiest one to hand to a beginner

If you are helping a parent recover holiday photos over the phone, this is the one to talk them through. The built-in walkthrough is genuinely good and you basically cannot get lost. It also ships separate Android and iOS editions, which most desktop-first tools do not.

Performance is where it falls down. Fine on NTFS, patchy on exFAT, nothing at all on Linux or Mac file systems. And the free version only previews — you pay before you save a single file. Worse, it does not handle bad sectors, so keep it away from a drive that is physically struggling.

6. R-Studio — what technicians actually run

R-Studio is the most capable tool on this page and the one I would recommend to the fewest people. It rebuilds RAID 0/5/6 arrays virtually, reads Linux ext4 and Mac APFS natively, includes a hex editor, and lets you write your own file signatures. It also assumes you know what a superblock is.

For a NAS that dropped two drives, or a RAID array that came up as “foreign”, this is the answer. For deleted holiday photos it is a chainsaw for a sandwich.

7. Wondershare Dr.Fone — best for phones specifically

Desktop recovery tools mostly cannot see inside a modern phone. Dr.Fone is built for exactly that gap — it pulls from the handset directly, from an iTunes backup, and from iCloud, and it goes after WhatsApp, LINE and Viber histories rather than just the camera roll.

The free scan shows you what is recoverable before you pay, which is the right model. The catch on Android is the same catch every Android tool has: without root, you are limited to media the system has not fully purged yet. That is a limitation of Android, not of this software.

8. AnyRecover — broad, simple, unremarkable

AnyRecover covers PC, Mac, iPhone and Android in one purchase and adds AI repair for corrupted photos and video. That breadth is real and it suits a household with mixed devices.

Recovery quality is the problem. On exFAT — the file system on most SD cards and USB sticks — it repeatedly failed to reconstruct folder names, dumping everything into a flat pile. It also makes you download a separate module before you can preview anything, which is a strange decision.

9. PhotoRec and TestDisk — free, ugly, effective

PhotoRec looks like it escaped from 1998 and it will recover your photos anyway. It is pure signature carving: it ignores the file system entirely and scans for the byte patterns that mark the start of a JPEG, an MP4, a DOCX. That means it works on file systems nothing else here supports, and it means you get every file back with a name like f0912384.jpg and no folders.

Its companion TestDisk does something different and occasionally miraculous — it rebuilds a broken partition table so the drive simply mounts again with everything on it. When that works, it is the best outcome on this entire page and it costs nothing.

Try these first if your budget is zero. Just know you will spend an evening sorting filenames.

10. Recuva — the two-minute free check

Recuva is worth ten minutes before you spend money. It is free, tiny, and for files deleted recently from a healthy Windows drive it often just works. Development has clearly slowed and its deep scan is well behind anything paid, but as a first attempt it costs you nothing but time.

Honourable mentions

Windows File Recovery — Microsoft’s own tool, free from the Microsoft Store, command line only. If you are comfortable typing winfr C: D: /regular /n *.docx it is a legitimate free option.

DiskGenius — strong partition-level work and a capable free tier. Worth a look if TestDisk intimidates you but you have the same problem.

DMDE — cheap, powerful, extremely unfriendly. Popular with people who recover data for a living and nobody else.

Side by side

How to actually run a recovery without making it worse

1. Stop using the device immediately. Unmount it, unplug it, power the machine down if the loss was on your system drive. Every write is a chance to overwrite what you want back.
2. Install the software somewhere else. A second internal drive, an external disk, another computer entirely. Never onto the affected volume.
3. Image the drive if it is behaving strangely. Clicking, stalling, disappearing and reappearing — image it first and scan the image. Disk Drill, Stellar and R-Studio all do this.
4. Run the quick scan before the deep scan. Quick scan reads the file system and is fast. If your files show up there, with names, you are done in minutes.
5. Preview before you buy. Every tool here previews for free. Open three or four of the files you actually care about. If they render, the licence is worth it. If they are grey squares, it is not.
6. Recover to a different drive. Writing recovered files back onto the source drive can overwrite the ones still waiting to be recovered. This is the single most common self-inflicted disaster.

Frequently asked