Data has always been a massive part of my life. I love listening to music, whether I’m at home, at work, in the car or hitting the gym. In fact, it would surprise many of my closest friends if I didn’t have a pair of headphones anchored around my neck at any given moment.
I also love to take photographs. I take pictures on my phone, with my DSLR camera and aim to get away abroad between 4-5 times a year to soak up some sun, see some culture and capture some Instagram-worthy shots, simply because I love doing it.
Of course, with over 7,500 tracks on my computer, and about half as many photos, backing up my content is routine for me, regardless of whether I’m using cloud storage, USB drives or SD cards. I typically aim to backup the most recent content on my computer about once a week.
However, after returning from my latest holiday in Venice, Italy, I was showing my friends some of my best pictures of the truly beautiful city, only for my cat to jump up onto the worktop, knocking m portable hard-drive to the ground.
I fell silent. On the hard-drive was years’ worth of files and folders from every aspect of my life. I cautiously plugged the drive back into my laptop, and there was nothing. The device was unreadable.
Panicking, I started searching online for what options I had available and came across a branch of software known as Data Recovery Software. After searching around, I found one program called RecoverIt, an advanced data recovery platform from Wondershare that claimed to be able to restore over 95% of my files.
This was exactly what I was looking for. If you’re in a similar situation and you’ve found yourself with lost data on your computer, hard drives, or other external storages, this could be the software you’re looking for.
The Lowdown
RecoverIt appealed to me for a number of reasons. Firstly, Wondershare has been in the data recovery industry since 2003, meaning they have nearly two decades worth of experience under their belt. During this time, they have served over 5,000,000 customers in over 160 countries.
You can’t say fairer than that.
The software itself claimed to be able to support over 550 unique file types and formats, had a 24/7 customer support helpdesk and even came with a 7-day money-back guarantee if I was completely satisfied with its performance.
To me, this was a no-brainer that this was the software that I was looking for.
Recovering My Lost Files
To give you a better understanding of the power that this software has, I’ll talk you through my recovery process, showing you just how easy the software has made it.
First off, I headed over to the RecoverIt website to download the software, available for both Mac and Windows computers. Downloading the software and installing it onto my computer was a piece of cake. There were no fancy options, no third-party software installations, just the installer which took a single click to install.
After installing and using my license key and email to unlock the software, I was presented with the extremely easy-to-navigate main menu, listing all the recovery options that were available to me.
In my situation, I was going to be using External Devices Recovery, but after looking through the other options, the process remains pretty much the same bar a few customised search options.
I connected my portable hard-drive, selected the option and waited with baited breath as the software begun scanning my device.
This part was nail-biting, to say the least.
As you can imagine, the software took a little while to run, since RecoverIt had detected around 128GB of data to scan through, but I was happy to go and make a pot of coffee and scroll through my social media feeds in the meantime. However, despite so much data, the software only took around half an hour to pull up my lost files.
As you can see, the scan managed to discover around 9,275 files, which seem about right seeing as though the device was holding 128GB of data. Using the panel on the left-hand side, I was able to find the lost files or browse the folders that were originally on the device.
I was also thankful for the ability to swap to ‘Files View’, which meant I could browse the files by file type and format, and could also search for individual files, filter by the date they were modified and their formats.
And there they were! 1,800 photos from my New Zealand trip, files I believed I had lost forever. I simply hit the ‘Recover’ button, waited about 30 minutes or so and every single file was restored and back to its original location on my hard drive!
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Super-fast device scanning
- A wide variety of file formats supported
- Ability to recover files that are years old
- Suitable for all kind of computer user and skill
- Comprehensive file filter system
Cons
- Unable to rearrange window sizes (not all file names were visible)
- About 1% of files were not found
The Final Verdict
My experience with the RecoverIt software was effortless. I tried restoring files on this portable hard drive, and then repeated the process for the recycle bin, my computer and an external USB stick and the process was as stress-free and painless as this one.
There were no real hiccups along the way, and the software is nicely laid out and navigable, meaning it can be used by computer beginners and experts alike.
The software itself was able to scan a huge amount of data in next to no time at all and the filter options made it easy for me to find the exact files that I was trying to restore.
All in all, I would highly recommend RecoverIt as your data recovery software of choice, whether you’re in desperate need of restoring your lost files or simply want a solution ready in case you ever need it.