Expert's Rating
Pros
- Recovers up to 1GB of data for free
- Easy to use
- Recovers from flash memory cards and optical media
Cons
- Doesn’t allow you to skip scan-halting bad sectors
Our Verdict
For ease of use and effective data recovery, Power Data Recovery will handle most jobs just fine. But it doesn’t allow you to skip sectors that might halt a scan. The program is free for recovering up to 1GB of data, but after than you need a license and the program’s $70 price tag puts it in direct competition with more versatile utilities such as R-Studio, Active@ File Recovery, and Stellar Phoenix.
Free and effective data recovery is nothing to sneeze at, and that’s what you get with MiniTools Power Data Recovery 6. At least, it’s free if there’s no physical damage to your hard drive and you don’t need to recover more than 1GB of data. If your loss amounts to more than that, you’ll have the plop down $69 for the pay version. Alas, at that point, Power Data Recovery is competing with more mature, more versatile—and in some cases, cheaper—alternatives.
Power Data Recovery’s interface is clean and intuitive. If you know what a partition is, you’ll be good to go. The program offers a simple file undeleter, lost and damaged partition recovery, as well as recovery of files from digital media (SD Cards, etc.) and CD/DVD. It can recover a large variety of file types (word processing documents, images, video, etc.), but has no sector editor for recovering snippets or pulling off raw data.
MiniTool Power Data Recovery can recover lost or damaged partitions as well as damaged hard drives, flash memory drives, or optical media.
In my hands-on, Power Data Recovery performed on par with R-Studio and Active@ File Recovery with the majority of my test media. But unlike those programs, Power Data Recovery provides no way to designate the start and end locations of a scan to skip bad sectors. Bad sectors often cause recovery programs to hang. On my test disk with such damage, Power Data Recovery worked overnight and never moved past the damaged area, and never hinted why. That’s a fail.
Other recovery programs hang on this particular drive as well (the Mac version of Stellar Phoenix excepted), but can be set to scan around the damaged sectors. MiniTool informed me that they intend to add a partial scan option the near future. Power Data Recovery already saves the results of a scan for later recovery—a pro-level feature. Note: With most programs, Power Data Recovery included, you can stop, or un-hang the scan by disconnecting the drive being scanned.
The big window can’t be minimized, which gets in the way—and if the program hits a bad sector that it can’t skip, you may have to put up with the inconvenience for a long time.
Another minor issue with Power Data Recovery is that currently, it can’t be minimized while it’s in operation. Scan operations can take a long time, and working around the Power Data Recovery window and dialog is annoying.
Operational issues aside, Power Data Recovery did recover data from most of my test media, which is the crux of the matter. For free, it’s well worth a shot if the files you need to recover total less than 1GB. That’s actually rather generous: The competition’s trial versions are generally limited to files sized less than 64KB, 1MB of data total, or something similarly minuscule.
Paying for Power Data Recovery is a different matter. The $70 personal version is a trick or two shy of claiming equality with the $30 Active@ File Recovery, $80 R-Tools R-Studio 7, and the $100 Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Pro—more mature utilities that offer the ability to scan only the undamaged portions of a hard drive. There’s also the free, unlimited Recuva from Piriform, which doesn’t have the success rate of the others I’ve mentioned, but occasionally does the trick.
When MiniTools adds a partial scan and better error handling, then it will be ready to run with the big boys as a pay-to-play product. The company seems gung-ho, so expect them to make the required improvements in short order.