Welcome to Recovery Review – the biggest collection of data recovery reviews!

Recovery Review strives to help consumers to better comprehend the modern data recovery market with strong emphasis to the do-it-yourself type of products. We carefully select only the best data recovery tools to produce unbiased reviews. We do our best to provide independent opinions on a variety of different data recovery, undelete and unformat tools. You are encouraged to download and use the reviewed tools.

There are several types of data recovery products.

Undelete and unerase utilities simply recover deleted files. You'll certainly find the right type of product if you're looking for a tool to quickly recover a few files.
Hard disk and partition recovery tools recover corrupted hard drives and partitions, repair formatted volumes and fix broken file systems. If you are looking for a tool to fix FAT, NTFS, ext2fs or MacOS logical disks, look no further!
Removable media recovery tools fix and repair data on corrupted USB sticks, ZIP drives, digital cameras, and memory cards such as SD, Compact Flash, MMC, Memory Stick. This category lists tools for portable MP3 and video players such as iPod, iRiver, and Zune.
CD and DVD recovery tools recover data from optical media with incomplete sessions, burn errors or wrong disk parameters.
Password recovery tools provide access to password-protected documents such as ZIP archives, MS Office, and Adobe PDF documents.
Database recovery and repair software fix corrupted databases such as MS Access or FoxPro DBF.
Email recovery tools fix corrupted mailboxes and recover lost email in Microsoft Exchange, Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, The Bat!, or Vista Windows Mail.
Everything else includes other useful tools related to data recovery, including secure delete tools, data wipers, and backup software.

In order to keep our site up-to-date, we’re searching for and reviewing new products daily. If you have discovered or developed a new data recovery product, we'd be happy to review it. Just let us know about the product by using our PAD submission form.

Free Data Recovery Software!

Ok, so you didn't have your data backup in place and you lost some files! So long as your hardware was not physically damaged, there is still a chance you may be able to recover your files with free or very inexpensive data recovery software. Free data recovery software is a bit hard to come by but I've rounded up a few good ones for a quick review here. Also, I might add on mention of a few very inexpensive shareware data recovery programs.
First, if your file is very precious, or lost due to partition missing, formatted,or damaged logical hard drive, virus infection, software crash, unexpected shutdown and other unknown reasons, you might also want to consider recovering it using commercial data recovery software like EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard, a utility that we recommend.

Second, if you decide to go the freeware or shareware route, whatever data recovery tool you try just try to use one that DOES NOT REQUIRE INSTALLATION. That's right, the software should run right off floppy, flash or CD. For recovery software that requires installation, you must have a second drive! Otherwise, installation of the recovery software will just permanently overwrite your data. Ouch!

Some helpful tips for using freeware data recovery software
If your drive is making strange noises or reports a CRC read IO error, DO NOT PROCEED. This indicates a hardware failure so your data is not going to be recoverable using "undelete" style data recovery software.
As soon as you realize your data has been deleted, stop using the computer! The less activity the better to avoid dangerous disk-swap activity.
Find and download data recovery software on another computer.
Save the recovery tool to a flash drive and run it directly from there.
Save the extracted data back onto the flash drive for added safety.