Minitool power data recovery free review

For ease of use and effective data recovery, Power Data Recovery will handle most jobs just fine. But it doesn’t allow you to skip sectors that might halt a scan. The program is free for recovering up to 1GB of data, but after than you need a license and the program’s $70 price tag puts it in direct competition with more versatile utilities such as R-Studio, Active@ File Recovery, and Stellar Phoenix.

Free and effective data recovery is nothing to sneeze at, and that’s what you get with MiniTools Power Data Recovery 6. At least, it’s free if there’s no physical damage to your hard drive and you don’t need to recover more than 1GB of data. If your loss amounts to more than that, you’ll have the plop down $69 for the pay version. Alas, at that point, Power Data Recovery is competing with more mature, more versatile—and in some cases, cheaper—alternatives.

Power Data Recovery’s interface is clean and intuitive. If you know what a partition is, you’ll be good to go. The program offers a simple file undeleter, lost and damaged partition recovery, as well as recovery of files from digital media (SD Cards, etc.) and CD/DVD. It can recover a large variety of file types (word processing documents, images, video, etc.), but has no sector editor for recovering snippets or pulling off raw data.

MiniTool Power Data Recovery can recover lost or damaged partitions as well as damaged hard drives, flash memory drives, or optical media.

In my hands-on, Power Data Recovery performed on par with R-Studio and Active@ File Recovery with the majority of my test media. But unlike those programs, Power Data Recovery provides no way to designate the start and end locations of a scan to skip bad sectors. Bad sectors often cause recovery programs to hang. On my test disk with such damage, Power Data Recovery worked overnight and never moved past the damaged area, and never hinted why. That’s a fail.

Other recovery programs hang on this particular drive as well (the Mac version of Stellar Phoenix excepted), but can be set to scan around the damaged sectors. MiniTool informed me that they intend to add a partial scan option the near future. Power Data Recovery already saves the results of a scan for later recovery—a pro-level feature. Note: With most programs, Power Data Recovery included, you can stop, or un-hang the scan by disconnecting the drive being scanned.

The big window can’t be minimized, which gets in the way—and if the program hits a bad sector that it can’t skip, you may have to put up with the inconvenience for a long time.

Another minor issue with Power Data Recovery is that currently, it can’t be minimized while it’s in operation. Scan operations can take a long time, and working around the Power Data Recovery window and dialog is annoying.

Operational issues aside, Power Data Recovery did recover data from most of my test media, which is the crux of the matter. For free, it’s well worth a shot if the files you need to recover total less than 1GB. That’s actually rather generous: The competition’s trial versions are generally limited to files sized less than 64KB, 1MB of data total, or something similarly minuscule.

Paying for Power Data Recovery is a different matter. The $70 personal version is a trick or two shy of claiming equality with the $30 Active@ File Recovery, $80 R-Tools R-Studio 7, and the $100 Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Pro—more mature utilities that offer the ability to scan only the undamaged portions of a hard drive. There’s also the free, unlimited Recuva from Piriform, which doesn’t have the success rate of the others I’ve mentioned, but occasionally does the trick.

When MiniTools adds a partial scan and better error handling, then it will be ready to run with the big boys as a pay-to-play product. The company seems gung-ho, so expect them to make the required improvements in short order.

MiniTool Power Data Recovery is an easy-to-use and all in one free file recovery software for home users. With this most effective free file recovery tool, you do not need to have technical background to use it. All the data recovery steps are logical and easy like 1-2-3. Just follow the data recovery step, and you will get your lost data back. Unlike other free file recovery software. MiniTool Power Data Recovery is very powerful and professional. It not only helps you recover deleted files, but also recovers data from damaged, reformatted hard drive as well. Furthermore, MiniTool Power Data Recovery not only recovers data from hard disk and RAID device, but also supports to recover data from CD, DVD disks, memory card, memory stick, and flash drive. As a data recovery software suite, MiniTool Power Data Recovery includes five data recovery modules - Undelete Recovery, Damaged Partition Recovery, Lost Partition Recovery, Digital Media Recovery and CD/DVD Recovery. Each data recovery module focuses on different data loss condition.

MiniTool Power Data Recovery Free Edition has 1 GB data recovery limit.

Is MiniTool Power data recovery good?

MiniTool Power Data Recovery offers solid photo recovery in mainstream situations – along with good value in some guises. But it's outdated and relatively limited compared to other apps.

Is MiniTool Power data recovery free?

MiniTool Power Data Recovery is an easy-to-use and all in one free file recovery software for home users. With this most effective free file recovery tool, you do not need to have technical background to use it.

Is MiniTool safe to use?

Is MiniTool Power Data Recovery Legit? MiniTool Power Data Recovery is a genuine tool to restore lost files on your computer. The application is not a malware or fake app and does get the job done. Sometimes recovered files turn up corrupted, but that is often the case in other data recovery tools as well.

Do you have to pay for MiniTool?

For Windows Users You can choose free edition or paid edition based on your own needs.