We don’t often review software on this site, but when EaseUs offered us the chance to evaluate their Data Recovery Wizard Pro software we jumped at the opportunity. It’s always handy to keep data recovery software ready in case you need to recover accidentally deleted files, especially if you don’t regularly back up important data to the cloud, an external hard drive or an off-site location. We’ve tested out the software, so here’s how it works and what we think of it.
The process
The Data Recovery Wizard is designed to make the process of recovering accidentally deleted, formatted or lost files as easy as possible. First, you select the partition and hard drive you’re interested in recovering data from. (Normally, this will be the C: directory in Windows.) There’s also the option to narrow things down further by selecting a specific folder – so if you know you’re looking for a photo saved onto your desktop, you can speed up the process by just looking in a specific area.
In our case, we’re going to select the entire drive to see what data we can find. This took about three hours for our large 1TB SSD; the larger and slower the drive, the longer the process will take. We found several files here, although many of them weren’t able to be recovered. This is an unfortunate reality of data recovery – sometimes, even professional tools like these can’t successfully retrieve the data you’re after, especially if a lot of time has elapsed between the deletion and the recovery attempt.
With that in mind, it’s important to remember that you should use the drive as little as possible to prevent the data you’re after from being overwritten, so it might be worth shutting down any programs running in the background (or even restarting into safe mode), then not touching your computer until the search has been completed. You can also install and run the Data Recovery Wizard app to a separate drive – including a USB drive – to prevent the installation and operation of the recovery app from destroying the data you want to save!
Now, we’re going to go through the process again with a specific area after deleting a photo from our Documents folder. We select the Documents folder in the program and hit scan, and this time it only takes a few minutes to trawl through the folder and move onto a deeper search of the rest of the drive.
You don’t necessarily need to wait for the search to finish; you can immediately begin looking at the files that have been found and recovering them – hopefully to another drive – while the search is still ongoing. However, being patient and waiting for the end of the scan will ensure you don’t miss something later.
You will likely find a lot of results even in relatively new drives, but the software does make sorting through them relatively painless. You can click through different folders on your computer to see which files were recovered from there, as well as a long list of files not associated with a specific drive location. This is where the ability to look only at certain file types comes in handy; if you know you’re after an image, you could look at the entries for JPG, GIF and PNG, for example. You can also filter by more broad categories, such as graphics, documents, videos and so on.
You have a choice of ‘recover’ and ‘preview’, with the latter attempting to give you an idea of what to expect from the file and if it is recoverable. For example, if you get a correct thumbnail from a deleted image, it’s likely that you will be able to recover the file completely. When you have selected the file or folder you’re interested in, press recover to begin the recovery process. The file will be pieced back together as well as possible, then copied to the location you’ve specified – as usual, try to select a drive that isn’t the one you’re recovering from!
Our impressions
The EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard worked well in our testing, successfully recovering some files we manually deleted to test the program as well as others that had been deleted some time ago. However, not all data is recoverable, and that certainly proved the case here.
We found the software quite easy to use, with a simple step-by-step interface that does well to focus you on easily answerable questions like “Where was the file you’re looking for?” or “What type of file was it?” The ability to filter by common file types, file categories and location certainly came in handy when trying to track down our document.
The language used in the interface could be improved somewhat though. The phrase “loading hard for you” definitely doesn’t feel like it was written by a native English speaker, for example.
However, this doesn’t affect the software’s usability, and represents an easy way for the app’s developers to improve it for English speakers in the future.
Another missing feature is the ability to install the software onto a USB stick and then boot from it, preventing Windows from futzing with your data while you’re attempting to mount a recovery operation. Stopping background processes and not doing anything yourself goes some way, but a complete solution would be a nice feature for power users.
Overall though, it’s hard to complain too much. The software worked well, was easy to use and generally provided all of the features I expected.
How to try the software yourself
If you’re interested in picking up the Data Recovery Wizard software for yourself, you can pick it up for a limited time at 50% off using the code H5Q-5RW-WX1. That brings the cost of the software down from a relatively high £84 to a much more reasonable £42. That’s for the professional version of the software, so you can always download the free version first to see if it can recover the files you’re interested in.
If you do give the application a go, let me know in the comments to tell me how it went! Were you able to recover your files? Did you find the program easy to use? Feel free to share your impressions for the benefit of other readers.
