Best File Restore Software for Windows and Mac

Disk Drill Pro costs $89 per year, and the Lifetime Licence costs $149 as a one-time purchase, with future updates included for the lifetime of the product. One Pro licence covers one user on up to 3 devices across Windows and Mac, which is a clear advantage over tools that sell Windows and Mac separately. The free Basic edition lets you scan and preview recoverable files, so you can check what is found before you buy.

• On Windows, Basic also allows recovery of up to 100 MB, while on Mac, ordinary recovery of unprotected files needs Pro.
• The extra disk tools add value when a drive is unstable.
• Disk Drill includes byte-to-byte backup, which creates a disk image, plus recovery of files protected by its data protection features.
• Working from an image can reduce further strain on the original drive.

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EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Pro for Windows costs $69.95 for one month, $99.95 for one year, and $149.95 for lifetime upgrades, with each licence covering 1 PC. The free edition recovers up to 2 GB, with 500 MB available by default and a further 1.5 GB after sharing on social media, according to the vendor. That 2 GB limit is the largest free allowance in this list, and it is enough for many document and photo recoveries without any purchase.

• Pro adds unlimited recovery, plus photo repair, video repair, document repair, NAS recovery, and crashed PC recovery with bootable WinPE media.
• The one PC limit is the main trade-off to plan around.
• If you need to recover files from a laptop and a desktop, you need two licences, and the cost doubles.
• The one month licence suits a single urgent job, while the one year licence suits a reader who expects more than one recovery in a year.

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Stellar Data Recovery Standard for Windows costs $59.99 per year, Professional costs $79.99 per year, Premium costs $89.99 per year, and Technician costs $99.99 per year, based on the vendor store listings checked for this article. The free edition lets you scan and preview, then recover up to 1 GB on Windows and Mac. Standard covers deleted, formatted, and RAW recovery, plus BitLocker recovery, for documents, photos, videos, and email.

• Professional adds lost partition recovery, recovery from a PC that will not boot, disk imaging, and drive health monitoring.
• The repair tools are the reason to pick Stellar over a plain recovery tool.
• Premium adds repair for corrupt photos and videos, which matters when a recovered file will not open.
• That is a different job from finding a deleted file, and many tools in this list do not include repair at all.

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Wondershare Recoverit for Windows costs $64.99 per month, with annual and perpetual options also listed on the official store page. The free edition allows a limited amount of recovery, so it works as a test of the scan before you commit to a licence. Essential covers unlimited file recovery, while Standard adds recovery from a crashed PC, and Advanced adds file recovery and repair for 2 PCs.

• Check the device count on the exact plan you select, because it varies by plan.
• Recoverit stands out for video.
• Its enhanced recovery mode reassembles fragmented video files that other tools may return as unplayable, and it includes repair for corrupt video.
• The bootable media creator lets you recover from a PC that cannot start Windows, which is useful when the system drive itself is the problem.

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Recuva Professional costs $24.95 as a one-time purchase, while Recuva Free costs $0 and includes advanced file recovery. That makes Recuva the cheapest entry point in this list for a Windows reader. It recovers pictures, music, documents, videos, and email from a Windows computer, the Recycle Bin, a digital camera card, or an MP3 player, and from other rewriteable media such as external drives and USB sticks.

• The deep scan mode searches for traces of deleted files that a quick scan misses, and the secure overwrite feature uses industry and military standard
• The limits are age and platform.
• Recuva is Windows only, and the official download page lists Windows 10, 8.1, 7, Vista, and XP, with no listing for Windows 11, so check compatibility
• Professional does not add extra recovery power, because the core recovery engine is the same in Free and Professional.

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R-Studio for Windows costs $79.99 for a permanent licence for the full edition. Cheaper filesystem editions are also listed: R-Studio FAT at $49.99 and R-Studio NTFS at $59.99, but those do not include the full toolkit, so do not mistake them for the $79.99 edition. Corporate costs $179.99, T80+ starts at $80 for 80 days, and Technician costs $899.99.

• The full edition supports NTFS, ReFS, FAT, exFAT, Ext2, Ext3, Ext4, HFS+, APFS, UFS, and XFS, plus RAID 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 10, and nested layouts, with au
• R-Studio suits a reader who wants to inspect a drive, not just browse a list of found files.
• The hex viewer and editor, the sector map, and the virtual RAID tools give you control over the recovery, but they also demand more knowledge than a w
• There is no free recovery tier, only a demo, so you cannot test a full recovery at $0 the way you can with EaseUS or DMDE.

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DMDE Express costs $20 for a one year personal use licence for 1 PC, Standard costs $48 as a perpetual licence for 1 PC, and Professional costs $95 as a perpetual licence. The free edition allows you to view the directory tree and recover up to 4,000 files from a selected directory per request, with no limit on requests. That is a rare free allowance, because most free editions in this list cap recovery by size, at 100 MB, 1 GB, or 2 GB, while DMDE caps it by directory and file count per request.

• Express adds bulk folder recovery, Standard adds lifetime updates and company use for your own needs, and Professional adds commercial recovery for cl
• DMDE also gives a clear warning on its order page: test recovery of the files you need with the free version first, and check that they open and read
• That warning is the unique fact in this article, and it is worth following with every tool in this list, not just DMDE.
• Choose DMDE when your lost files sit in a small number of folders, because repeated directory requests may cover the whole job at $0.

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PhotoRec costs $0, because it is free open source software distributed under the GNU General Public License v2+. It is a companion program to TestDisk, which recovers lost partitions and makes non-bootable disks bootable again. PhotoRec ignores the file system and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if the media file system has been severely damaged or reformatted.

• It recovers lost files including video, documents, and archives from hard disks, solid state drives, CD-ROMs, and lost pictures from digital camera me
• The trade-off is organisation.
• PhotoRec searches for known file headers, so it can find a file even when the directory record is gone, but it does not normally restore the original
• You will need time to sort the recovered files, rename them, and check which ones open correctly.

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