As a photographer, your photo library is one of the most important things to keep safe and backed up. Of course, you can have backups on multiple drives, cloud storage, and servers, but hardware can still fail. The risk is exceptionally high during or after a shoot, between the time you take the SD card out of the camera and plug it into your card reader. The last thing you want to see is a drive read error, but it happens. Luckily, there's an easy solution.
Whether it was a hardware failure or accidentally pressing the format button, data recovery has sadly become something most photographers have become all too familiar with. And in severe cases of data loss, sending the drive off to a specialist can become incredibly expensive. However, alternative options exist for us photographers at a fraction of the cost, and I recently got my hands on one of the best solutions in the industry.
Stellar Photo Recovery's latest version, 12, was launched recently. This app is specifically designed for photographers to recover lost data on any form of media storage, such as a faulty SD card, hard drive, or SSD. Being paranoid about data loss, I had to put the software to the test.
Stellar Photo Recovery has many new features, including setting the app in a dark, light, or vibrant theme and previewing recovered files. While the scan is in progress, you can browse through the folders and preview any recovered thumbnails of photos and videos, which is quite handy if there are any files you do not wish to recover in the process. It also offers a host of data formats for you to choose from. All the primary photo, video, and audio formats are supported; however, I loved that it allows you to add your own formats. Add 10 files of the same format, and Stellar Photo Recovery will analyze the data and look for similar formats on the affected storage drive. You also get the option to run a deep scan, which runs a comprehensive scan if a standard scan turns up with no results.
To test the software, I ran three different tests. One involved recovering video files after an accidental formatting on an SD card I use in my DJI Osmo Pocket 3, another involved recovering deleted raw photos from a CFexpress card I use in my Canon R5 C, and lastly, I attempted to recover photo, video, and audio data from an old Western Digital Black 4 TB drive (spinning drive) that I know to be faulty and haven't been able to recover any files from.
Recovering Deleted Files From Removable Storage
After a quick shoot using my DJI Osmo Pocket 3, I purposefully deleted the videos using the camera's on-screen menu, deleting all the content from the 128 GB SD card. I inserted the card into my laptop's reader and ran Stellar Photo Recovery. The process was quick and straightforward. Stellar Photo Recovery has a simple and clean design, making navigating through the initial wizard easy. Select the type of data you'd like to recover ("All data," "Photos only," "Videos only," or "Audio only"), select the drive you'd like to recover data from, press "Scan," and sit back and wait for the process to finish. In this instance, the software took around 25 minutes to successfully perform a deep scan on my SD card and recover all the video files. The first test was a resounding success!
Like my first test, I shot a few photos in raw (CR2 Canon raw) and deleted them in the camera interface. After inserting the 128 GB CFexpress card into my card reader, Stellar Photo Recovery recovered these files in no time, fully intact.
Recovering Files From a Broken Hard Drive
After dusting off an old hard drive I've known to give me issues, I decided to give it a go and see whether Stellar Photo Recovery could access anything. I've tried with other, similar data recovery applications, and none of them provided any positive results. I was sure it was because the drive was quite old and had traveled halfway across the world with me. It also made some audible clicking noises, which is never a good indication. Nevertheless, I plugged it in via a USB-SATA adapter connected to my laptop and loaded Stellar Photo Recovery. Eureka! It picked up the drive, and what's more, it found some old photos and videos I had forgotten about. It took a while to recover, but I expect this was due to the age of the drive and the read/write speed of the USB-SATA adapter. The drive was not readable in Windows via the File Explorer, but Stellar Photo Recovery picked it up and quickly recovered its raw data.
What I Liked About Stellar Photo Recovery
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User-friendly interface
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Picks up most file extensions
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Deep scanning functionality
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The ability to add unlimited additional file extensions
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Raw digital format compatibility
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Photo previews of recovered files
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The ability to pause, save, and resume recovery
What I Didn't Like about Stellar Photo Recovery
While using the software, I couldn't report any significant flaws or annoying bugs. Stellar Photo Recovery does what it needs to do and does it well.
Conclusion
Overall, I am happy with how the application restores lost files, even from what I thought was an unrecoverable drive. The software ran well on my Windows laptop and searched and recovered files with decent speed, too! The ability to add custom file types is also a bonus if you're looking for uncommon file types. Stellar Photo Recovery has three tiers available, namely the Standard, Professional, and Technician tiers. All three tiers can recover unlimited file types. However, only the Professional and Technician tiers can repair corrupted photos and videos. This can be useful if you have a damaged memory card and urgently need to recover corrupted data. Pricing for the Standard version is in line with that of their competitors. At the time of writing, they offer discounts on their Regular, Professional, and Technician tier licenses (valid until May 15, 2025).
With all that said, having a solid backup workflow in place is always a good idea. Ensure your photos are saved in multiple backup locations to prevent the need to worry about recovering lost data. However, having recovery software always saves the day when the unexpected happens while you're on location or traveling.
Stellar Photo Recovery offers a user-friendly interface, and I had great results when trying to recover files from different types of storage media. I was able to recover most, if not all, of the files I had lost on an old hard drive. I would give it a perfect 10/10 for anyone needing to recover their lost data.
You can download Stellar Photo Recovery here.
