Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery 5.0

Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery claims to be able to retrieve from your hard drives and external storage devices all your lost and deleted media files, even once that drive or device has been formatted. It supports all the most popular image file formats and a wide range of RAW formats, as well as all the most widely used audio and video formats.

The program scans the selected drives and USB devices thoroughly, performing a deep analysis that allows it to locate media files that you thought you will never see or hear again. You can tell the program to scan the whole drive looking for any file marked as deleted, or you can search for specific file formats on specific drive regions. This will certainly speed up the scanning process, which may otherwise take a while considering the current size of some of our hard drives. To help you locate the images, videos, or audio files you are looking for, all files are neatly organized by media type and file format on the fly. Once the scanning process has finished, this tool will offer you various attractive ways of selecting the files you wish to recover from the entire list of recoverable files found.

I like everything about this tool, except for the fact that anyone downloading and installing the trial provided will never be able to really check if the program does what it is supposed to do or not. It does show you a large number of image files that you thought were lost forever, but that is no guarantee that the program will bring them back to life for you. Many recovery applications keep insisting on this “look, but don’t touch” policy, thinking that just a quick look at your lost photographs will lure you to buy a license right away. Wouldn’t it be more convincing to see that the program does recover your images? These may come with a watermark, or in a lower resolution, or in any other way that does prove that the program works without giving it away. These marketing strategies are still beyond me.

Francisco Martínez

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