Data Recovery Digest

Hard drives can fail in two ways: physical and logical. Physical damage, like if the drive has become water damaged, can only be recovered when sent to a professional recovery centre. Logical recovery, on the other hand, can performed at home using programs, often to great success. There are many different recovery programs available on the market; so much so that it can become difficult to choose the best program. This article will take a look at MiniTool Power Data Recovery and analyse the features that this utility offers.

The free version of Power Data Recovery allows users to recover 1GB of data. If you’re looking to perform a full recovery of your hard drive, that’s not going to be enough. A full version of the software, with no limits on the recovery amount, can be purchased for $69. A boot disk can also be purchased for the same amount (or the two can be combined for a discount). However, if you’re just looking to recover a specific bit of data, or perhaps from a disc or USB stick, you might find that 1GB is all you need.

Power Data Recovery has five separate modules that will be shown when launching the program: undelete, damage partitions, lost partitions, digital media and CD/DVD recovery. This means that the utility can be used for a number of different scenarios and files. Some of the more uncommon file types supported includes m4v, 3g2, wtv, wrf, pps and dps; even compressed and encrypted files on a NTFS drive are supported. The program also supports recovery from hard drives, memory cards, flash drives, discs (CD/DVS/Blu-ray) and iPods.

The interface is simple, clean and easy to understand. Big icons appear to represent each of the five modules outlined above, making it a breeze to get on the road of data recovery. The only other buttons are to buy the bootable CD and to contact technical support.

CNET performed some brief tests, purposely removing data and partitions in order to see how well the program performed. They found it successfully, displaying the results clearly and allowing certain (or all) data to be recovered through tick boxes.

A word of warning: if you’re running Power Data Recovery, don’t install it to the drive you’re looking to recover from. If a drive has become damaged then you should stop using it immediately or you risk further damage. As such, install the program to a separate device and then run it from there, pointing the program in the direction of the damaged drive.

Although the program performed well, it could be said that separating it into five different modules is more confusing, and time consuming, than it needs to be. When competitors like R-Studio combine everything into one, it’s perhaps an easier approach.

Nevertheless, MiniTool Power Data Recovery proves to be a solid tool for data recovery, offering support for a wide range of file types and devices. Plus, if you’re only looking to recover a small amount of data then you can use the program for free.