Ranked · Security 2026

Best data recovery software 2026: four tools, and the physics none of them beat

Every product in this category is sold on the promise that it gets your files back, and not one of them can make that promise. What decides the outcome is what happened to the drive after the files went — whether anything has been written to it, and whether it is a solid-state drive. Buy the tool second. Here are four ranked on the things you can actually check: what the free tier returns, what the licence covers, and whether you can get your money back.

PRPriya Ramanupdated 21 August 2026 · 11 min read

Some links on this page earn us a commission. It never affects the ranking — see our disclosure.

There is a sentence missing from most comparisons in this category, so here it is first: recovery software cannot promise recovery. It reads what is left on a drive. If the bytes are still there it can usually rebuild the file; if they have been overwritten, no product on this page and no price you pay will bring them back. We earn commission on some of these links, which is exactly why the ranking below is built on things you can check for yourself — free caps, licence scope, refund terms — rather than on success-rate percentages that no vendor can substantiate.

The second thing worth knowing before you read any further: every tool here scans and previews for free. You can establish whether your files are recoverable before spending a penny, and you should, because two of the four make refunds difficult or impossible.

Best data recovery software

scored out of 5

1DD
Disk Drill★ 4.3
Anyone covering more than one machine, or reading a drive from a computer that will not boot
free recovery capped at 100 MB on Windows; PRO $89/yr or $149 lifetimeGet it →
2EA
EaseUS★ 4.1
Finding out whether your files survived, before spending anything
free up to 2 GB; Pro from $69.95 for one month, $149.95 lifetime (Windows)Visit
3ST
Stellar Data Recovery★ 3.7
Windows users who want a genuine money-back guarantee behind the purchase
free up to 2 GB; Professional $89.99/yr, Premium $99.99/yr (Windows)Visit
4RE
Recuva★ 3.3
A Windows recovery you would rather not pay for at all
free with no recovery cap; Professional $24.95/yrVisit

What actually decides whether you get it back

Tools compared: 4
Free recovery caps: None to uncapped
Sold outright: 3 of 4 offer a one-off licence
Deleted from an SSD?: Usually unrecoverable

Deleting a file does not usually erase it. The operating system removes the record that says where the file lives and marks the space as available, and the data sits there until something else is written over it. That gap is the entire business model of this category — and it is also the reason the outcome is mostly decided in the first ten minutes, before any software is involved.

Stop writing to the drive. Downloading an installer to it, saving a document, letting it carry on as your system disk while Windows writes logs and updates — each of those can land on the blocks holding the file you want. Installing the recovery tool onto the drive you are recovering is the classic way to destroy the thing you are trying to save. Install it elsewhere, or run a portable build from a USB stick.

Recover to a different drive. Writing recovered files back to the same volume can overwrite other files that have not been recovered yet. An external disk or a second internal drive is the minimum precaution, and it is free.

If it is an SSD, adjust your expectations sharply. Solid-state drives run TRIM: when a file is deleted the operating system tells the drive those blocks are no longer needed, and the controller erases them in the background — often within minutes, and TRIM is on by default on current Windows and macOS machines. After that the data is not unlinked, it is gone, which is why recovery tools so often return zero-byte files from SSDs. A partition lost to corruption or a bad format is a better case than a deletion, because TRIM may never have been issued. But no tool in this ranking, or any other, recovers erased flash cells.

If the drive is making noises, stop entirely. Clicking, grinding or disappearing from the BIOS is mechanical failure, and every additional power-on reduces what a lab can retrieve. Software is the wrong instrument for that problem.

None of which makes these products worthless. It means the honest question is not which tool recovers the most — nobody can answer that for your drive — but which one lets you find out for free, covers the machines you own, and treats you fairly if it fails. That is what the ranking measures.

The four tools in detail

★ Editor’s pick

1DD

Disk Drill

4.3

free recovery capped at 100 MB on Windows; PRO $89/yr or $149 lifetime

Disk Drill PRO: one user, three devices, macOS and Windows in a single licence

One licence across Mac and Windows and the widest filesystem coverage — with the smallest free allowance

Disk Drill wins on the two things you can verify before buying: what the licence covers and what the software can read. One PRO licence covers a single user on macOS and Windows across three device activations, where EaseUS and Stellar both sell Mac and Windows as separate products and licence one computer at a time. It reads APFS, HFS+, NTFS, ReFS, FAT, exFAT, ext2/3/4 and BTRFS, so a drive pulled out of a dead machine is readable from whatever you plug it into. And the free edition includes byte-to-byte disk imaging, which is the single most useful thing in this guide: take a sector-level copy of the affected drive, then scan the copy and leave the original alone. Two real costs. The free recovery allowance is 100 MB on Windows and nothing at all on Mac — the smallest here by a distance. And CleverFiles states that PRO purchases, subscription and lifetime alike, are non-refundable except where consumer law compels it. Preview your files before you pay; there is no safety net behind that decision.

A single PRO licence covers both macOS and Windows and activates on up to three devices
Reads APFS, HFS+, NTFS, NTFS5, ReFS, FAT16/FAT32, exFAT, ext2/3/4, BTRFS and raw disks
Byte-to-byte disk imaging is free — copy a failing drive first and scan the copy instead
The $149 lifetime licence is perpetual, and CleverFiles now bundles lifetime updates with it

Buy the $149 lifetime licence, not the $89 subscription

The annual licence auto-renews at whatever the price is on the renewal date. The lifetime licence costs $60 more once, never charges again, and carries lifetime updates. For software most people run twice in a decade, the subscription is the wrong shape.

What works

The only tool here whose one licence spans Mac, Windows and three machines
Free byte-to-byte imaging lets you work from a copy rather than the drive that is failing
Broadest filesystem support in the category, including APFS and Linux volumes

What doesn’t

Free recovery stops at 100 MB on Windows, and the Mac build carries no free recovery allowance at all
CleverFiles states PRO purchases are non-refundable except where consumer law compels a refund
The $89 annual licence auto-renews at whatever the price happens to be on renewal day

See Disk Drill pricing →Full Disk Drill reviewCleverFiles, shipping Disk Drill since 2010 · one PRO licence covers macOS and Windows, one user, up to three device activations

Trustpilot (CleverFiles): 4.4G2: 4.0Capterra: 3.8

2EA

EaseUS

4.1

free up to 2 GB; Pro from $69.95 for one month, $149.95 lifetime (Windows)

Data Recovery Wizard Pro, one licence per computer; 30-day money-back guarantee

The approachable data-recovery tool: free to scan and preview, expensive to actually recover

EaseUS is the one to open first, whatever you end up buying. Scanning and preview are unrestricted, so within a few minutes you know the only thing that matters at this stage: whether your files are still readable. Then it hands back 2 GB free, which for a folder of documents is the entire job done at no cost. The interface is the friendliest in the category and it is designed for someone doing this once, under pressure, at an unhelpful hour. Where it slips is the commercial terms. $69.95 buys one month on one computer; the Mac builds are separate products costing $20 more at every tier; and the refund is granted on technical grounds only — EaseUS says explicitly that it will not refund a licence that has already recovered your data. It is a good tool sold on terms that assume you are not comparing.

Free edition scans and previews without limit, then recovers 500 MB — 2 GB after a social share
Covers internal and external drives, SSDs, USB sticks, SD cards, RAID and NAS volumes
Deep-scan and partition-recovery modes for formatted or corrupted volumes
Todo Backup Home and Partition Master Professional cover backup and partitioning separately

The one-month licence is the rational purchase

For one accident on one drive, $69.95 for a month beats $99.95 for a year and $149.95 for a lifetime, and it does not roll on. If you find yourself recovering repeatedly, that is a failing drive telling you to replace it, not a reason to upgrade the licence.

What works

You can confirm your files are recoverable before paying anything
Scan-preview-recover flow that non-technical users can follow under pressure
Mature product with high aggregate ratings on Capterra and G2

What doesn’t

$69.95 for a one-month, one-computer licence, against free tools that do the same job
Refunds are granted on technical grounds only, and not once the software has worked
One licence per computer, with Windows and Mac priced as separate products

Visit easeus.com →Full EaseUS reviewChengdu Yiwo Tech, trading since 2004 · vendor-stated 530m+ users across 190 countries; Windows and Mac builds sold separately

Trustpilot: 4.9Capterra: 4.5G2: 4.7

3ST

Stellar Data Recovery

3.7

free up to 2 GB; Professional $89.99/yr, Premium $99.99/yr (Windows)

Standard, Professional, Premium, Technician and Toolkit editions; 30-day money-back guarantee

The deepest edition ladder in the category, sold one computer at a time — and its “lifetime” licence runs ten years

Stellar has the clearest refund position of the four — a plain 30-day money-back guarantee on the annual subscriptions, where EaseUS refunds only on technical grounds and CleverFiles does not refund at all. Its free tier gives 1 GB, or 2 GB after a social share. And the edition ladder goes further than anyone else here: Professional adds lost-partition and non-booting-system recovery, Premium repairs corrupted photos and video, and Technician and Toolkit handle RAID and virtual machines, so a case that escalates does not mean starting again elsewhere. Two things hold it back. A licence installs on one computer at a time and the Mac editions are separate purchases, so a household pays repeatedly. And its lifetime licence is not one: Stellar’s own licensing page defines lifetime as ten years of use for a one-time payment. Ten years is a long time. It is not what the word says.

Free edition recovers 1 GB, rising to 2 GB once you share the product on social media
Professional adds lost-partition and non-booting-system recovery; Premium adds photo and video repair
Reads BitLocker-encrypted and RAW volumes when you can supply the recovery key
A plain 30-day money-back guarantee — the clearest refund promise of the four

Start at Professional, not Standard

Standard only recovers deleted and formatted files from a volume that is still there. The cases people actually buy recovery software for — a partition that has vanished, a system that will not boot — need Professional at $89.99.

What works

The refund is a straightforward 30-day money-back guarantee, not a technical-fault clause
The edition ladder runs all the way to RAID and virtual-machine recovery if the case needs it
Free tier hands back 2 GB before any money changes hands

What doesn’t

A licence covers one computer at a time, and the Mac editions are separate purchases again
Stellar’s own licensing page defines the “lifetime” licence as ten years of use, not forever
Capterra shows 2.8 from a small sample of 13 reviews — far below its Trustpilot standing

Visit stellarinfo.com →Full Stellar Data Recovery reviewStellar Information Technology, India, trading since 1993 · Windows and Mac editions sold separately; one computer per licence at a time

Trustpilot: 4.8Capterra: 2.8

4RE

Recuva

3.3

free with no recovery cap; Professional $24.95/yr

Recuva Free or Recuva Professional; Professional adds virtual-drive support and priority support

Free, uncapped and Windows-only — the one to try before you spend anything

Recuva is last on capability and first on a point nothing else here can match: the free edition has no recovery cap. Everything else scans for free and charges you to write the files back out. Recuva just writes them out, from FAT, exFAT and NTFS volumes on Windows, with a portable build that runs off a USB stick so nothing is installed onto the drive you are recovering. For a straightforward Windows deletion that is very often the whole answer, and trying it costs nothing but time. The limits are real and worth stating plainly: Windows only, no APFS, HFS+ or ext4, nothing for RAID or virtual disks, and development that has settled into maintenance — v1.55.133 in June 2026 was an EU withdrawal-rights compliance change rather than a recovery improvement. The $24.95 Professional licence buys automatic updates and priority support; Piriform’s own comparison table puts advanced file recovery in the free column too, so it does not recover more. Run the free one. Do not upgrade expecting a better result.

The free edition has no recovery cap — the only tool in this ranking without one
A portable build runs from a USB stick, so nothing is installed onto the damaged drive
Deep-scan mode rebuilds files whose filesystem records have already gone
Professional costs $24.95 a year, a fraction of anything else in the category

Same corporate group as Avast, AVG and Norton

Piriform was bought by Avast in 2017 and Avast is now part of Gen Digital — the group the FTC fined $16.5m in 2024 over the sale of browsing data. It has no bearing on whether Recuva recovers a file, but read the installer screens and decline the extras.

What works

Free and uncapped, so a small recovery can genuinely cost nothing
The portable build avoids writing to the drive you are trying to recover from
Light, fast and simple enough to drive at two in the morning

What doesn’t

Windows only, and it reads FAT, exFAT and NTFS alone — no APFS, HFS+ or ext4
Development is maintenance-level: v1.55.133 in June 2026 was an EU withdrawal-rights compliance change
Professional buys virtual-drive support and priority support, not better recovery
A Gen Digital product, like Avast, AVG and Norton — the group the FTC fined $16.5m in 2024

Visit ccleaner.com →Full Recuva reviewPiriform, 2007; owned by Gen Digital since the 2017 Avast acquisition · Windows only; FAT16/FAT32, exFAT and NTFS volumes; a portable build is published

TechRadar (editorial): 4.0Softpedia (editorial): 3.5

The widest coverage, and one licence for every machine you own

Disk Drill reads APFS, NTFS, ReFS, exFAT, ext4 and BTRFS, covers macOS and Windows on three devices from a single licence, and images a failing drive for free before you scan it. Preview your files first — purchases are not refundable.

See Disk Drill pricing →

How to choose in five minutes

Before anything else: stop using the drive, and plan to recover to a different one.
On Windows, with a straightforward deletion? Run Recuva first. It is free, uncapped, and often the end of the story.
Not sure your files survived? Scan and preview with EaseUS or Disk Drill. Both are unlimited and free up to the point of writing files back out.
More than one machine, or a Mac and a PC? Disk Drill, lifetime licence — one purchase covers both platforms across three devices.
One Windows accident, one drive, today? EaseUS, the one-month licence. It does not roll on.
Want a refund if it fails? Stellar, Professional tier — the only plain 30-day money-back guarantee here.
Drive clicking, or files deleted from an SSD days ago? Do not buy anything yet. The first is a lab job; the second is usually beyond software entirely.

And the thing that makes all of this unnecessary: a backup running on a schedule to somewhere that is not the machine. Every tool on this page exists because that was not set up in time.

Frequently asked

What is the very first thing I should do?

Stop using the drive. Every byte written to a volume can overwrite the data you are trying to recover, so close what you can, do not save anything to it, and unplug it if it is external. If it is your only internal disk and the machine is still running, the safest move is to shut down and recover the drive from another computer. Then install the recovery software somewhere else, and recover the files to a different drive again.

Can any of these guarantee my files come back?

No, and be suspicious of any page that implies otherwise. Deleting a file usually removes the filesystem record rather than the data, which is why recovery works at all — and equally why anything written since may have overwritten it. Vendors publish success-rate percentages; they are unaudited marketing figures, they describe no case in particular, and they cannot know the state of your drive. The free scan and preview in each of these tools is the only honest answer to the question, and it costs nothing.

I deleted files from an SSD. Is there any hope?

Usually not, and this is a property of the hardware rather than a failing of the software. Modern SSDs run TRIM: when a file is deleted the operating system tells the drive those blocks are free, and the controller erases them in the background, typically within minutes. Once the flash cells are cleared the data is physically gone and no software can retrieve it — which is why recovery tools often return zero-byte files from SSDs. The exception is a partition lost to corruption or a bad format rather than a deletion, where TRIM may never have been issued. Try a free scan; just do not buy on hope.

Are free tools good enough?

Frequently, on the common cases. Recuva is free and uncapped on Windows. TestDisk and PhotoRec are free, open source and more capable than any of this on a technical level, at the cost of a command-line interface at the worst possible moment. Windows File Recovery is a free Microsoft tool in the same spirit. What the paid products sell is a scan-preview-recover flow that a non-technical person can follow while panicking, plus breadth of filesystem support. That is worth money to some people and nothing to others.

Why are these still sold as one-off licences when everything else is a subscription?

Because the usage pattern is a one-off. Nobody recovers files every month; they recover files after an accident, and then hopefully never again. Three of the four here still sell a perpetual licence — Disk Drill at $149, EaseUS at $149.95, and Stellar at an unpublished figure — and where the choice exists, the one-off is usually the better buy against an auto-renewing annual licence. Read the definition, though: Stellar’s licensing page defines its lifetime licence as ten years.

My drive is clicking or has disappeared from the BIOS. What now?

Turn it off and stop. Clicking, grinding, stalling or vanishing from the BIOS point to a mechanical or controller failure, and running recovery software at a physically failing drive makes it worse every time it spins up. That is a job for a lab with a clean room, and it costs hundreds rather than tens. Stellar runs its own labs, which is one practical reason to start there if you suspect physical failure.

Which one should I actually buy?

Most people should not buy anything until they have run a free scan, because the scan answers the question the purchase is meant to solve. On Windows, start with Recuva — free and uncapped. If it cannot see your files or they are on a Mac or Linux volume, preview with EaseUS or Disk Drill, both free and unlimited to preview. Then buy Disk Drill’s lifetime licence if you need breadth or cover more than one machine, EaseUS’s one-month licence for a single Windows incident, or Stellar if you want the money-back guarantee.

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