Top 15 Document Recovery Software

Amy Dennis

Aug 04, 2023 • Filed to: Recover Files • Proven solutions

When you have lost or deleted important files and photos, and have tried to recover them to no avail, all can seem lost. The feeling of despair is overwhelming. But, what many people don't realize is that once a file is deleted, all that happens is that the reference to the file is removed, preventing the computer from accessing it. In reality, the file still resides on the disk and is recoverable using specialized document recovery software.

Lost or deleted files are a way of life. It is common to accidentally delete files. There are also causes of file loss such as malicious deletion or data corruption due to viruses, malware, and ransomware. When a file is deleted, it ordinarily goes to the Recycle Bin or Trash. It resides here until it is automatically purged or deliberated deleted permanently by emptying the bin. When the bin is emptied, the file still resides on the disk but the computer is unable to access it because the file system reference no longer exists.

When this happens, the only way such as file can be recovered is through document recovery software. File recovery software programs can scan the storage media and recover the lost file. Each tool operates differently, some require to be installed while others are stand-alone tools that can be carried in a USB stick and used to recover data from a computer.
In this article, we discuss five of the top file recovery software programs.

Top 10 Document Recovery Software

1. Recoverit

Recoverit an easy to use tool that you can use to recover various file types including documents, emails, videos, audios, and images from computers hard drive, memory cards, digital cameras, and external media storage. It has four recovery modes that can restore data as a result of deletion, partitioning, formatting, and virus or malware manifestation. It is easy to use the tool and comes with a preview feature that enables you to crosscheck scanned files before actual recovery. Moreover, it supports both Mac and Windows version

Your Safe & Reliable Document Recovery Software

• Recover lost or deleted files, photos, audio, music, emails from any storage device effectively, safely and completely.
• Supports data recovery from recycle bin, hard drive, memory card, flash drive, digital camera, and camcorders.
• Supports to recover data for sudden deletion, formatting, hard drive corruption, virus attack, system crash under different situations.

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Pros

• It has a great user interface
• It has four powerful recovery modes.
• It recovers various data types lost in any kind of scenario.

Cons

• The free version has limitations
• It takes time to scan files

Ratings: 5/5 stars

2. Undelete Plus

Undelete Plus is a powerful recovery tool that can recover lost data files. It can recover files from DDR memory cards, floppy disk, hard drives, memory cards, computers, and digital cameras. This software is effective and very to use. It can recover deleted files from recycle bin, due to formatting, virus attack, and system failure or data loss due to virus attack. Recovering files is super fast you just need to specify file types and path and scan. It supports Windows operating systems such as; Windows 10, 7, 8, 2003, 2008, Vista, and XP. Undelete plus can recover music files, photos, emails, videos, and Documents. The documents include Word, Excel, HTML, and PowerPoint Text just to name a few.

Pros

• It is an easy to use tool
• It recovers many file types

Cons

• The free trial version has limitations
• Scanning takes time
• The total recovery of files is not guaranteed.

Rating: 3.5/ 5 stars

3. Recuva

Still, looking for document recovery software that can recover your entire MS office file? Recuva software can do you justice. It will also recover images, music, videos, and audios that are in FAT, NTFS, and exFAT file system. It supports memory cards, media players, digital cameras other storage media devices. Recuva restores data lost due to deletion, formatting, and partitioning or even virus attack. All you need to do is deep scan and restore the lost files.

Pros

• It quickly recovers different file types
• It has a deep scan feature
• It can sort files into different file types such as videos and audios.

Cons

• The total recovery of photos is not guaranteed.
• To fully recover the file you need the paid version

4.Pandora

Pandora Data Recovery is another ultimate software that enables you to recover your lost files. It can recover deleted files from the recycle bin that is in NTFS and FAT file system. This software does not only recover deleted files but also those lost due to formatting and system failure. Due to its powerful scanning, it can recover files from a drive that had been damaged. You can also recover files from hard drives, memory cards, flash drives, and digital cameras. Pandora supports windows OS namely, Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 10. Finally, this software can recover a wide variety of data types like music, videos, audios, documents, emails, and photos. The latest version supports Digital Negative image (DNG) and Quick Time movie File (MOV). If you lose your Word, PowerPoint, Excel, or HTML documents are assured to have them back.

Pros

• It has an easy user interface
• It has a wizard tool that recovers tool quickly
• It is can recovery drives from various drives
• It has a preview feature that allows you to look at scanned files.

Cons

• It cannot recover some file system from unknown drives

Ratings: 4/5 stars

5. Fireebook Mac data recovery

This is Mac-based software that enables you to recover, archives, emails, photos, videos, music, and Documents. Its powerful recovery allows the recovery of various documents including Excel, HTML, Word, PowerPoint, and texts. You could have misplaced these file types due to virus attack, software crash, power failure, formatting name them, but this software will restore them. It can scan lost files in hard drives, flash disks, media player's digital cameras, and IOS devices. It is easy to use software that lets you preview files before recovering them

Pros

• It is easy to use
• It is fast when scanning files
• You can preview documents and listen to audios before final recovery.

Cons

• When a file cannot be restored it does not give a reason, unlike other software that provides information if it unsupported file system.

Ratings: 4.5/5 stars

6. Stellar Data Recovery

This another intuitive data recovery tool that you can use to recover all your documents such as HTML, Texts, PDFs Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Moreover, it can recover images, videos, audios, archives from your PC, storage media, hard drives, digital gadgets, server, recycle bin, and RAID that are in FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS/NTFS5, and EXT2/EXT3 file system. This powerful software can recover files lost due to different scenarios such as partition loss, virus attack, deletion, formatting, system failure, and improper operation. It is compatible with windows and mac OS so you just need to download the appropriate software.

Pros

• It has an easy to use interface
• It is a fast and powerful recovery tool
• It can perform a deep scan

Cons

• The free version has limitations
• It's time-consuming to scan a large volume of files

Rating: 4.5/5 stars

7. DiskDrill

DiskDrill is an all in one-tool tat lets you restore and protect your data from future loss. It is a professional easy to use tool that recovers data due to; deletion, formatting, partition loss, and system crash as well as virus attack. Your l lost files should be in HFS & HFS, FAT, FAT32, exFAT, NTFS, EXT3 or EXT4 file system. Disk Drill can recover documents such as eBooks, PDFs, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. This document recovery software can also recover music, photos, and videos from media players, digital devices, servers, external hard drives, and computers. Furthermore, it has three protection modes to secure your data on your Mac.

Pros

• It recovers different types.
• It can protect data from futures loss
• It is easy to use

Cons

• It takes time to recover files

Rating: 4.5/5 stars

8. Tenorshare Any Data Recovery

Tenorshare is scaling the heights of data recovery with its software Tenorshare Any Data recovery. As the name suggests, it can recover any form of data including music, videos, documents, images, audios, emails, and archives. To be precise it can recover PDFs, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and others. Whether your hard drive is damaged, storage device corrupted, camera broken or you clicked Shift + Delete on your computer, you can still recover your precious files. Using Tenorshare is very easy and accurate. You also stand a chance to preview scanned files before the final recovery. Also, it supports Windows, Mac, and Linus OS.

Pros

• It is reliable and accurate.
• It supports many file formats
• It has a friendly user interface.

Cons

• The free version has limitations.

Rating: 4/5 stars

9. Wise Data Recovery

This freeware data recovery software allows you to recover formatted, deleted, corrupted, images, music, video archives, email, and documents. This data can be restored from cameras, computers, flash drives, media players, and any form of the external storage device. Compressed files can also be restored. If you are eager to recover your PDFs, HTML, Word, Excel, Texts, and PowerPoint documents then this is the ideal tool.

Pros

• It supports different file formats
• It is compatible with several hard drives
• It is easy to use

Cons

• It cannot detect a drive problem
• The recovery process is time-consuming

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

10. UndeleteMyFiles Pro

UndeletedMyFiles is a professional data recovery software. It supports to recover accidentally deleted document files from computer hard disk, USB drive, SD memory cards, and another storage device.

Pros

• It is easy to recover files from the PC.
• It supports specialized filters.
• It is free software that supports backup and restores data.
• It has an emergency disk image which is a critical tool.

Cons

• It only supports Windows system like Win7 x32, Win7 x64, WinVista, WinXP

Rating4/5 stars

11. Puran File Recovery

Puran comes as a set of more than 20 utilities, one of which is document recovery. This program recovers deleted/lost files/partitions and can recover data from formatted disks as well. Just about anything detectable as a drive in the Windows system is scannable regardless of its file system. These drives can be hard disks, memory cards, pen drives, mobile phones, DVDs, CDs, any storage device.
Pros

• The software is free to use.
• It supports Windows XP, 2003, Vista, 2008, Windows 7, 8, and 10.
• It comes with native support for 64 Bit Windows.

Cons

• Deep scanning takes more time than a normal scan.
• Deep scanning rarely ever detects more data than the normal scan.
• Despite the pros, the user interface is not attractive.
• The tool is only compatible with Windows operating system.
• It doesn't let you select the files you want to recover, you have to recover all lost files.
• The developer hasn't updated it in a long-time. This makes it potentially buggy.

12. TestDisk Data Recovery

TestDisk is freeware command-line file recovery software whose primary function is file partition recovery and makes non-booting disks bootable again. Some of the key features include:

• Repairing partition tables and recovering deleted partitions.
• Recovering FAT32 boot sectors from backups.
• Rebuilding FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 boot sectors.
• Repairing FAT tables.
• Rebuilding NTFS boot sectors.
• Recovering NTFS boot sectors backups.
• Repairing MFT using MFT mirrors.
• Locating ext2/ext3/ext4 Backup SuperBlock.
• Recovering deleted files from any file systems such as FAT, exFAT, NTFS, and ext2 filesystem.
• Copying files from deleted FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext2/ext3/ext4 partitions.

Pros

• Compatibility with the Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux operating systems.
• It comes with highly advanced data recovery features such as repairing and rebuilding backups, sectors, and file allocation tables.
• TestDisk is free to use.

Cons

• Being a command-line tool, it is too technical for regular users.
• It does not have a graphical user interface.

13. Windows File Recovery

Windows File Recovery is a file recovery software program created by Microsoft. This tool recovers files from hard disk drives, memory cards, USB drives, and to a certain extent some solid-state drives. Windows File Recovery supports the recovery of many file types that have been deleted from the Recycle Bin. You can recover photos, documents, videos, and much more. The tool is downloadable from the Microsoft store.
Pros

• It is free.
• It is a Microsoft product and therefore operates seamlessly with Windows.
• Being hosted on the Microsoft Store makes it easy to install with a single click.
• Windows File Recovery can be installed on other Windows devices such as Windows Phone and Xbox.

Cons

• It is available for Windows 10 (2004) and above and not previous Windows versions.
• It is not compatible with any other operating system except Windows.
• It is a command-line utility which makes it too technical for some users. Users must learn complex syntax to recover files.
• Windows File Recovery does not have a graphical user interface.

14. SoftPerfect File Recovery

SoftPerfect document recovery software is a free and simple tool used to restore and rescue accidentally deleted data. It recovers data from hard disks, memory cards, SD cards, USB drives, and any other type of storage media. The tool has support for the most popular file systems such as NTFS, FAT32, and others.
The tool is user-friendly with a clean interface. It runs as an executable from an external drive such as a USB or Pen Drive.
Some of the main features include:

• Free and Lightweight.
• Support for both FAT and NTFS file systems
• Can recover data from compressed and encrypted disks.
• Recognizes any type of storage media.
• It comes as a portable executable file with no installation needed.

Pros

• The file is lightweight. The installation file is only 579 kilobytes in size.
• It is free.

Cons

• It only works on the Windows operating system.

15. Restoration File Recovery

If you have a computer running on an old Windows version such as XP and Windows 7, then this is a good tool. Some of the main features include:

• Lightweight and portable because it comes as an executable file that needs no installation.
• Runs on Windows 95, Windows XP, and Windows 7.
• Recovers files from both NTFS and FAT file systems.
• Scan results are sortable by date, size, name, and folder.
• Search deleted files to identify a file with a specific name or extension.
• Has the option to search for empty files.
• A special menu, allows you to select Delete Completely to employ the Random Data and Write Zero data sanitization techniques to permanently delete all the data in the search results.

Pros

• Extremely simple and easy-to-use user interface.
• Usable without installation (portable).
• The small file only takes up 500KB of disk space.
• Can recover multiple files simultaneously.

Cons

• Has no feature to show file recoverability.
• Can't restore entire folders only single files.
• Isn't compatible with Windows 10 or 8.

The Bottom Line

The above are five free document recovery software programs. When all else seems lost, these applications can help you get your files back. They all have their pros and cons which should guide your particular circumstances.