Formatting, disk crash, accidental deletion, file corruption… there are many reasons to lose files on a computer. That’s why it’s essential to plan regular or automatic backups of these most sensitive files…
But once we've said that... we're pretty far from progressing. So when we've lost our files or they're damaged, what can we do? There is a fairly effective solution that comes in the form of a software called Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery. Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery is one of those software programs that is a bit of a last resort in case of disaster… like when you accidentally delete your wedding photos and you don’t have any backups!
In fact, this software is a bit like the Swiss army knife for recovering media files (photos, videos, audio, etc.) on all types of media: hard drives, USB sticks, memory cards, cameras, etc.
The principle of Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery is rather simple, it performs an analysis of a disk to find all recoverable images and multimedia files. Obviously, the larger the disk you want to scan, the longer the scan will take. For a 1TB hard drive, well filled, it took me several dozen minutes.
Note that the software manages many formats:
- most image formats: around fifty formats including all the classics (JPG, GIF, etc.), but also more specific formats (EPS, PSD, NEF, ARW, etc.)
- most video formats: around thirty formats including of course all the classics and many other formats (DIVX, MP4, MPG, MOV, AVI, etc.)
- most audio formats: around thirty formats (AIFF, MP3, MIDI, OGG, WAV, etc.)
Please note that if the format you are interested in is not available, you can add other formats by teaching the software to recognize the format of the file you want to recover!
Once the analysis is complete, the software provides a preview of the scanned images and media files it can recover
All you have to do is find your famous lost images, select them, click on the "Recover" button, select a folder to save the recovered images... and you're saved! That said, it can be quite tedious to find a specific image, because it turns out that the software really finds a lot of images... so it's a bit like looking for a pin in a haystack... but it's worth the effort!
This software is available in a free version that is limited to analyzing your disk, which will allow you to view the recoverable files. In order to recover your files, however, you will have to invest €49.90 in the full version. But the advantage of this system is that at least you will be able to quickly realize whether or not it is worth buying the software… and I think that is rather smart!
Note that there are also more complete versions that also allow the repair of damaged JPEG or video files.
In short, Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery is a fairly powerful tool that will help you get out of a bad situation... Of course, the software is not free, but recovering important multimedia files is priceless!
