Piriform Recuva is one gem of recover software. It will help you recover just about any deleted files of files in drives that simply won’t mount. Alternatively, you can also use this tool to recover emails, videos, and photos among other files types. Nowadays, everything that goes with the word ‘budget’ would surely have a ring in your mind. These are all the inexpensive, cheap and affordable items that you could find. Seeing those would make you feel like having a shot owning some of them. This goes the same to data recovery tools. There is a lot of famous and good data recovery software out there, it is just that they go alongside a huge amount of cost needed, and not everyone has that capacity. Thankfully, there is Piriform Recuva Pro. It is a very inexpensive data recovery software. It has a free version and also a very low-cost $19.95 professional version available to all of its customers. It is a very good low-cost/no-cost data recovery software. Well, it does give out some things that a file recovery software would do, but since it costs less, it performs pretty much less than those that are costing a significantly larger amount than how Piriform costs its products. But even so, if you are someone who is looking for something like software that would recover the files that you have lost in a low-cost manner, then this one would be a good choice because it will certainly get the job done. There is a built-in feature inside the Professional version, this is the ability to create image files from the disks with the file that you want to recover, and then recover the files from the image. This is a feature that is very important when you are working with a drive that is physically failing. You might be very intrigued by this software after all of those descriptions, but if you are a Mac user, sadly there is no version available for you. But if you are a Windows user, then imagine having the privilege of owning the flagship application of Recuva, the Piriform Recuva Pro that is available for only $20. Way lower than how other products would typically set a price on their flagship products. Not just that, if you are not interested in purchasing the product but still wanting to experience the product itself, you may do so. You may do it by downloading the free trial version of the product. It may be a trial version, but this version does not have limits on how much the amount of data you may be able to recover. This makes Recuva a company that creates a huge buzz around the software industry.
How to use Piriform Recuva for file recovery
When it comes to using this tool for data recovery, I strongly recommend using the wizard. It provides you a clear break down of the various steps required to successfully recover your file.
I can’t forget to mention that this tool has a very intuitive and user friendly interface something that makes it very easy to use. To begin, you will need to launch the software. That done, you will be prompted to specify the type of files you intend to recover. You will need to select one type or go for the option of looking up any recoverable files. One you choose appropriately, proceed to scan for your files. It is important to note that there ae two scan options available with this tool. There’s quick scan which searches for your files in in seconds. Then there’s deep scan which takes relatively long durations, but does a good job searching for your lost files. You can also choose to sequentially use both so that you do a quick scan then proceed on to deep scan. When you’re done scanning, use the preview option to check for the files that have been recovered. This option allows you to choose the particular files you want to recover. That way, you won’t waste a lot of time recovering unnecessary files.
Once you choose the particular files, you proceed to recover them by simply clicking on the recover button. The process of recovering your files might take longer, depending on their sizes. Recuva is compatible with windows operating system as well as macOS. Besides, it supports different file formats and can be used to recover files from damaged drives, unmounting disk partitions, DVDs, CDs, Memory cards, etc. There’s also Recuva advanced plan, though it doesn’t come with any additional features. Instead, this plan appear to provide you with more info about recoverable files. You get to know the state of your files so that you can choose whether or not to recover them. It makes use of traffic light system to give the user an idea of quality of data in the drive. Piriform Recuva have made some tweaks and updates to the original version. This new version comes with a secure overwrite for Windows 10, better drive and partition detection, a couple of bug fixes together with other additional features.
Pricing and Licensing
As what was mentioned earlier, this software does not have a version for Mac, it is only available for Windows. Piriform offers a free, unsupported version. The Pro version has premium support, optical media recover, virtual drive recovery and automatic updates. There are also business licenses available if you are interested in getting the product for business purposes. But if you want to have it that way, it is a little bit different here because you will need to buy a new license for every computer that these thingsget used on.
This makes this one not a good choice for those IT professionals who are working on different computers. Here are the versions and the rates of Piriform Recuva Pro. These licenses will only run for 1 year.
- Recuva Pro. It performs basic data recovery and is only in a single license. Costs you $1.66 per month, with a yearly billing of $19.95.
- Recuva Business. It performs basic data recovery and will let one PC have one single license for a whole year. This will cost you $2.91 per month and will bill you $34.94 per year.
- CCleaner Professional Plus. This may sound out of the context but this one is a bundle version offered by Recuva. It has a Recuva Professional Version that comes with PCCleaner, Defraggler,and Speccy. This will cost you only $3.33 per month and bill you $39.95 per year.
Features of Piriform Recuva Pro
Though this one is called a budget software, a low-cost one, this does not mean that it has a huge lack of features and functionalities. In fact, it has a good amount of decent features considering its pricetag. If you are fond of using those advanced features from other data recovery software out there or you might have heard of their advanced features, then you will probably miss them if you will now start using Piriform Recuva Pro. Some of those features are the ability to recover lost partitions, startup-disc recovery, cloning and also the decent sorting of features to parse the recovered data. Not just that, this software also cannot be used to recover the data that are coming from RAID storage. If you are someone who sees those features so important, then we do not suggest for you to use Piriform Recuva Pro. There is other software out there that would do the things that you are looking for, but certainly, they will cost more but definitely worth it.
Additional features
As aforementioned, Recuva is loaded with many cool features. In addition to the above mentioned, the following are additional features the come with this tool. Supported scan options
Quick scan Deep scan File sorting by type Drive scanning by file type
Scan capabilities
Full hard drive scan Deleted/Lost file recovery Corrupted partition recovery Deleted partition recovery Disk cloning
Recovery from external drives
Optical drive recovery SD card recovery Removable media recovery External drive recovery
Supported file formats Piriform Recuva recovery tool supports different files formats. In this review we have categorized the types as follows:
Archives: Zip, Gzip, Stuffit, and RAR Videos: MPEG-4, QuickTime, AVI, and WMV Audio: MP3, WAV, AIFF, AAC, and Ogg Image files: JPEG, PNG, RAW, Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator Documents: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF
Supported file systems Like file formats, this recovery tool is also compatible with a wide range of file systems. We have categorized these in terms of the supported operating system as well as storage drive.
Mac file systems: HFS and HFS+ Windows file systems: FAT and NTFS Removable storage drives: exFAT
Recuva has a recovery vault that runs background processes that provide an additional layer of protection to HFS+, HFS, FAT, and FAT32 hard drive partitions. The vault ensures that you recover all the files with their original names and not generic names like is the case with most leading recovery software. Note that the recovery vault feature is only available on windows platform. Mac users can recover all their files with the original names without necessarily using the recovery vault feature. Recovering files with this tool also happen pretty fast. After scanning and previewing the files, you only need to tap on the recover button and begin retrieving all your files in one piece.
Why you need Piriform Recuva data recovery software
Recuva is packed with many advanced featuresand also features a very simple user interface. Together with these, here are additional reasons why you need to check out this data retrieval tool.
Can be used to recover deleted files, lost or formatted drives. Can also be used to recover data from non-mounting disk partitions and crashed drives Has licenses for individual use as well as commercial uses. Free as well as premium paid plans. The free plan supports recovery of up to 1GB of data. Quick and deep scans can search lost files and partitions and display what’s available for recovery. It is compatible with windows and MacOS It supports different file systems; NTFS, HFS, FAT, EXT4, and exFAT Has a multiple recovery algorithm that supports universal partition search and recovery of lost encrypted data. Recovery process can be paused, recovered, and loaded at a user’s convenience. It can be used to recover data from any device that can be mounted to your PC; internal or external drives, memory cards, cameras, USB flash drives, etc. Perfect Do It Yourself recovery tool that is simple and therefore can be used for individual as well as home data recovery. It has a 24/7 customer supports that is always ready and willing to offer help whenever possible.
Performance
The performance of this software is also not disappointing. It only took a few seconds to do a quick scan on the drive that we inserted. The quick scan discovered 6 out of 7 files that we have tried to delete. Although when we did the deep scan, it recovered the files. Well, it may explain to you that using the quick scan is not as reliable as much as how deep scan does. When testing a USB flash drive, it only took at around a minute for it to be deep scanned. Then it has displayed the lists of files that were discovered. Sadly, it did not discover everything that we removed from the USB drive. It’s not a very bad result though, as it discovered most of the missing files. An advanced mode is also available in this software, you could have this one turned on with settings in just a matter of clicks. But as much as how you want them to be very effective, the advance scan function only works with some of the graphics formats, not from those PDF or Microsoft Word files which are a little bit disappointing. It also did not recover or find the deleted files on an SSD. This is not a new result though, as most of the data recovery software out there give out the same end-results too. It did claim to discover everything that was lost in the drive (after deleting them inside the recycle bin) but then none of those files recovered were usable when trying to use them. We did another deep scan, and some of the files were discovered too, these were the DOCX and the PDF files. But sadly, they too did not work well or become usable and corrupt.
Customer Service
Piriform Recuva has a very responsive customer support. The team is available on a 24/7 basis and is ready and willing to offer help and assistance whenever possible. Besides, there’s a Recuva online knowledge portal where you can find all info about their products and services. Here, you will be able to read out and understand how this software coming from Piriform works. Of course, the headline of this portal is their flagship product, the Recuva. However, one downside that some may find with the portal is the info isn’t detailed. That notwithstanding, it is still an excellent source of information about this data recovery utility. There is an online user forum though so that you could post some questions and have other users of Piriform answer it for you. Recuva seems to attract a good amount of influence among developers and other web users. If you are fond of sending emails, there is an email support feature available if you are paying for the Recuva Pro subscriber. If you are not, then there is no way that you can contact Recuva with any question that you have. This also comes with the online chat support and the telephone service, you won’t be able to reach out to themwithout having a paid subscription in you.
Conclusion
Well, if those things give you a huge worry in your minds, then do not hesitate to look for other data recovery software out there in the market. Definitely, this one is not the only one situated out there. If you are someone who is financially capable of purchasing licenses of other stronger and better data recovery tools, then do so. The purchase that you will make will definitely show a difference to the projects you are doing. Overall, this one is a pretty much good data recovery tool. It is not that kind of a disturbing and annoying data recovery tool. Instead, it does what it actually says and promises. For something that definitely does not cost that much, this one is such a very good choice and there is no other data recovery tool out there that would match how they give out their service.
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