Stellar Data Recovery
Version 12.6.0.0 · Stellar Information Technology · Windows 7 / 8 / 10 / 11 (64-bit) · ranked #157 in the library
A recovery suite for the moment a drive stops cooperating, scanning past a deleted entry, a quick format or a broken partition table to rebuild the files that are still physically present on the disk.
Read the installation section below before you start. The order of the steps matters on this release.
About this release
Overview
Deleting a file does not erase it. The entry disappears from the file system index and the space is marked as available, but the actual data sits on the platters or in the flash cells until something writes over it. Stellar Data Recovery works that gap. It reads the volume directly, reconstructs what the index used to point at, and where the index is gone entirely it falls back to signature scanning, matching the header patterns of several hundred file types and carving them out of raw sectors.
The scan modes cover the range of situations people actually arrive with. A quick scan finds recently deleted files in minutes and is usually enough for the accidental delete. A deep scan reads the whole volume sector by sector and takes hours on a large drive but recovers from formatted, repartitioned and severely corrupted volumes. There is a dedicated path for a partition that has vanished from the drive listing entirely, which searches for boot sectors and file system structures and rebuilds the volume map from what it finds. Every scan can be paused and its state saved, so a twelve hour pass on a four terabyte drive does not have to be restarted from zero.
The product ships as a set of tiers and this package includes all of them. Professional covers documents, photos, video and audio from healthy and formatted volumes. Premium adds photo and video repair for files that come back but will not open, which is common with interrupted card writes and camera crashes. Technician adds RAID reconstruction across RAID 0, 5 and 6 with parameter detection, virtual drive image recovery, and the ability to run against machines other than the one it is installed on. The edition selector appears at first launch and can be changed later without reinstalling.
What it does
Feature breakdown
Signature based deep scan
Carves files out of raw sectors by matching header and footer patterns across several hundred formats, which is the only method that works once the file system index is gone.
Lost partition recovery
Searches the drive for orphaned boot sectors and file system structures and rebuilds a volume that no longer appears in the drive list, including after an interrupted repartition.
Photo and video repair
Repairs files that recover but will not open, using a known good sample from the same camera as a reference for the missing structural data.
Drive imaging before recovery
Clone a failing drive to an image file first and recover from the image, so a disk with bad sectors is only read once rather than hammered through a long scan.
RAID reconstruction
Rebuilds RAID 0, 5 and 6 arrays with automatic detection of stripe size, block order and parity rotation when the controller metadata is lost.
Bootable recovery media
Build a USB recovery environment so a machine that no longer starts can still have its system volume scanned without pulling the drive.
Changed in this build
Version 12.6.0.0
- Faster deep scan on large NVMe drives, with better queue depth handling on modern controllers.
- Additional file signatures added for recent camera raw formats and several project file types.
- Video repair now handles longer files without loading the whole stream into memory.
- Preview panel rebuilt so a recovered document can be checked before committing the whole selection.
- Scan state saving is more reliable when a session is interrupted by a power loss rather than closed cleanly.
Installation
Follow these in order
- Do not install it on the drive you are trying to recover from. Every write to that volume can destroy what you are looking for.
- Go offline and extract the archive to a different physical disk than the damaged one.
- Disable real time protection, the activation component is flagged by every engine.
- Run the installer as administrator and select the edition you need from the tier list.
- Close the installer rather than launching from the finish screen.
- Start the application, confirm the edition shown in the title bar, then re-enable protection.
Release notes
From whoever packed it
- Recovered files must be written to a different drive than the one being scanned. The application will refuse the same volume for good reason.
- If the drive is making noise, image it first and scan the image. A mechanically failing disk gets worse every minute it spends spinning.
- Stop using the affected volume immediately. Continued use is the single biggest cause of unrecoverable data.
System requirements
Minimum and recommended
| Operating system | Windows 7 through Windows 11, 64-bit |
|---|---|
| Processor | Intel or AMD dual core minimum, quad core recommended for deep scans |
| Memory | 4 GB minimum, 8 GB recommended for large volumes and RAID reconstruction |
| Graphics | No specific requirement |
| Storage | 500 MB for the application plus a separate destination drive with room for everything you recover |
Questions about this release
Answered before you ask
- Can it recover from a formatted drive?
- Yes, if a quick format was used and nothing substantial has been written since. A full format that zeroed the drive leaves nothing to find.
- Does it work on SSDs?
- It works, but TRIM means deleted blocks are often cleared by the controller within minutes. Success rates on SSDs are far lower than on mechanical drives.
- Which edition should I pick?
- Professional for ordinary deletes and formats, Premium if the recovered photos or videos will not open, Technician for arrays and multi-machine work.
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