Ontrack EasyRecovery deserves its long-standing reputation as the powerhouse among data recovery software. Like the electrical substation down the road from you, it's notable more for its power than for its elegance, however. Still, if you know how to use it, it can recover more data than any other app of its kind, and it's a clear winner of our Editors' Choice for data recovery software. If, however, it seems too complex for you, then you may be better off with the slightly less powerful, but far more usable, Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery, another top pick.
Even if you're a bit intimidated by Ontrack, though, you should keep in mind that it has unequalled power to retrieve data, and that it may be worth your while to learn its sometimes-daunting interface. Like Seagate Premium Recovery Suite, Ontrack is sold as an annual license, but whereas Seagate limits you to 24 annual recoveries per user, Ontrack has no limits on the number of times you can use it during the annual license term.
Mac users might want to try Ontrack EasyRecovery for Mac, but we haven't yet reviewed it. Our current Editors' Choice for mac data recovery is Alsoft Discwarrior .
Getting Started With Ontrack
When you first start the Ontrack app, it looks as friendly as you could hope for. A spacious menu lets you choose to recover data from a hard drive, a memory device (meaning a USB key), optical media like a CD or DVD disc, a multimedia/mobile device (think mobile phone or iPod), or a multi-disk local RAID system. The menu is a bit misleading: Neither the Home version that we tested nor the $149-per-year Professional version support RAID systems. For that feature, you'll need to go to the Enterprise version ($499 per year).
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As with the other data recovery products PCMag has reviewed, I tested Ontrack with a traditional spinning hard drive from which I deleted a set of miscellaneous files and then emptied the Recycle Bin. When I chose the hard disk option from Ontrack's menu, the app displayed a confusing menu with three different options for scanning the disk—one as a physical disk, one as a disk partition, and one as a drive letter.
All three options produced the same result, but the distinctions between disk, partition, and drive letter could be useful for technically advanced users recovering data from damaged drives. Those users might want to recover information from a lost partition, and would choose the disk option rather than the partition or drive letter, but for nontechnical users recovering files from an undamaged file system, the distinctions between disk, partition, and drive letter normally won't matter.
Ontrack then takes you to a menu that allows different kinds of scanning, including a quick scan of deleted files and a Formatted Media Recovery option that digs deepest into the drive. Other choices include secure deletion of files that you might want to delete forever, and a disk-diagnostic option. Still more options guaranteed to confuse non-technical users include different file systems that can be searched for on the disk, but the app had already intelligently filled in the options I needed.
Fast Data Recovery
Ontrack was startlingly fast at finding all my deleted files, taking perhaps a second to scan the deleted file entries in a 2TB traditional spinning hard drive. Among the hundreds of files that it listed, I found the ones I wanted by searching them by name, one by one. Ontrack's menu divided the files in each folder into different file types, but it didn't display all PDF, JPG, and similar files that it found until I entered PDF, JPG, and so on in a search window. A moderately user-friendly right-click menu let me view or save the found files, but other apps make the job easier.
I also tested a Ontrack with a flash drive that I reformatted after copying a dozen files to it, choosing the Formatted Media Recovery option to search the drive. Ontrack then got to work scanning the flash drive, and did the job slightly faster and slightly more completely than Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery ($99.99 at Stellar) . It found all the deleted files, and when I told the program to save them to disk, all the files were in complete, usable form.
Where Did My Files Go?
Before I could save the recovered files, however, I had to find them in Ontrack's unhelpful interface. The found-file list was easier to manage with the slow deep-scan option than it was with the normal deleted-files option. For example, graphics files were easy to find under the heading Images. PDF files were also easy to find, because Ontrack listed them under Documents. But the Word and WordPerfect documents were listed, confusingly, under the heading "Applications." That's because Ontrack organizes these files according to their MIME type—a kind of organization mostly used internally by an operating system or across the internet.
If you don't know the MIME type of your document files, you're not alone, but you'll only find your recovered Word documents in Ontrack's interface if you know to look for them under the heading "zip-msword." That heading is used because DOCX files are actually ZIP archives that contain multiple files—but users normally never see DOCX files as ZIP archives because the operating system displays them as if they're traditional document files.
Once you figure out where your DOCX files are hiding in Ontrack's interface, you can easily select them for recovery. That's a lot better than the interface of ProSoft Data Rescue, which displays Word files as if they were ZIP files, with no clue that they're the documents you might be looking for. ProSoft Data Rescue was just as adept as Ontrack at finding deleted files in my testing, but it gave no clue at all that two of the ZIP files that it recovered were actually Word documents.
Ontrack's interface has a thumbnail option, but it only works with graphic files. If you want to preview a DOCX or PDF file, you need to let the program save the file to disk and then open it. You should be careful when doing this, because you want to be sure that you're not writing the file to the same disk from which you're trying to recover data. The Ontrack software tries to save these files to a safe location, like another disk partition or a different physical drive, and warns you before it saves them, just in case you want to save them somewhere else.
SOS on SSDs
Like every other product I tested, Ontrack couldn't help me recover files that I deleted from a solid-state drive (SSD) and then made unrecoverable by emptying the Recycle Bin. In a quick scan, it reported that it found all the deleted files, but when I tried to preview the files or recover them to disk, the resulting files were unusable. When I tried a deep scan of the SSD, the app reported finding hundreds of deleted files on the drive, but provided no easy way to figure out which, if any, were the ones I wanted.
Ontrack Mail-in Data Recovery Service
For this kind of file recovery, you may want to consider mailing in your drive to Ontrack's data recovery service. Ontrack claims to have advanced tools that can recover data even from SSDs, and it has the best reputation in the industry for data recovery, but you'll definitely pay for this level of expertise. Recovery starts at $300 and goes up from there. That sounds like a lot of money, but it's all too easy to imagine scenarios in which you'd be willing to pay that much (or more) to get your files back.
You do get quick service for this fee, at least. Kroll promises to evaluate single drives smaller than 6TB within four hours of receiving them; for drives 6TB that deadline jumps to 24 hours. After that, the recovery process begins; Kroll says jobs are completed in an average of 7 days. Ontrack provides a detailed cost estimate before you buy, and you can always decide that you'd prefer to live without your files than pay the price. By comparison, Seagate and Prosoft have no stated minimum fees for recovery, and their stated timeframes for data recovery are two to 21 days and seven to 10 days, respectively.
Complete, Complex Data Recovery
I wish Ontrack EasyRecovery's user interface was more lucid and user-friendly than it is, and I would never suggest it to tech-challenged relatives and friends who won't know that their lost Word files can be recovered under the heading Applications/zip-msword. For those users, our other Editors' Choice for Windows data recovery, Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery, is by far the best option. Furthermore, Stellar Phoenix offers the option to create a disk image from a failing drive, a feature Ontrack lacks. Despite these issues, for anyone who wants the ultimate in data recovery software, Ontrack EasyRecovery is the most powerful tool available.
Once you've recovered as much of your lost data as you can (hopefully you get it all), your very next step should be doing your best to ensure that you never find yourself in this situation again. While no solution offers a guarantee of total safety, you can go a long way toward protecting yourself and your files with backup software. For extra piece of mind, you might also consider backing up your data to the cloud. That way, even a disaster that takes out all your local drives won't destroy your data. For this, you'll want to use an online backup service.
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