Wondershare Recoverit review

Wondershare is one of the big names when it comes to creative tools and PC utilities. So, it’s no wonder that its Wondershare Recoverit excels as one of the best data recovery software.

It has a superb interface, and behind that you’ll find a robust set of features that can recover photos and video – and, if you’re happy to pay for higher levels, you’ll benefit from video repair options and bootable recovery tools too. There’s even support for recovering from NAS and Linux devices depending on the version you buy.

We’ve put the software to the test to see if it can recover data to the extent it claims. Read on till the end for the full review, along with pros, cons, interface, and user experience.

Wondershare Recoverit: Plans & pricing

Wondershare Recoverit plans start at $59.99 for its monthly subscription, with the annual plan costing $99.99 and the lifetime perpetual costing $129.99. Although this might sound steep for some users, each of these plans covers two PCs, which means you are effectively paying only half to recover data on a single PC.

This is a big advantage over platforms like EaseUS, which offer the same pricing structure but only for a single license. Plus, just like EaseUS, the only difference between these plans is the licensing duration – all other features stay uniform under each plan.

Overall, Recoverit is an affordable data recovery option, especially if you want to recover data from more than one device. You can also bag an extra 10% discount via a code that keeps flashing on the pricing page.

There’s also a free plan you can use to test out Recoverit’s capabilities. However, you can only recover 500MB of data with it, which is much less than what EaseUS (2GB) and Stellar Data Recovery (1GB) offer.

Wondershare Recoverit: Features

Recoverit is one of the few data recovery tools that supports Linux, besides Windows, Mac, and NAS devices. You can recover more than 1,000+ file formats, including photos, videos, and documents, from SD cards, external drives, crashed computers, HDDs, SSDs, GoPro devices, cameras, the Recycle Bin, and much more.

I found Wondershare Recoverit pretty good at recovering fragmented media on my disk. Unlike other tools that rely on signature-based recovery, Recoverit uses advanced machine learning algorithms for pattern-based reconstruction, which allows it to reconstruct missing pixels, corrupted headers, and broken frames.

Besides this, Recoverit has a dedicated video repair engine where you can upload a sample video from the same device, allowing the software to learn its encoding structure and rebuild the corrupted video based on that pattern.

While the provider claims it uses AI for its reconstruction process, saying so would be an overstatement. That said, Recoverit is more advanced with its repair-driven recovery approach, which integrates a multi-stage repair mechanism, but calling it AI-based is not the right approach.

Scanning

One thing that impressed me was Recoverit’s fast scanning speeds. You simply need to select a drive location and hit the scan button to start the process. Much like EaseUS, Recoverit also initially runs a quick scan followed by a deep scan, but at a much faster pace. I was able to scan 640GB of data within 2 hours, whereas Stellar took more than 5 hours for the same.

The best part is that you can view deleted files while the scan is still ongoing, allowing you to recover them as well. This is better than Stellar Data Recovery, where you have to wait for the entire scanning process to complete before you can recover anything.

Recoverit was also very light on CPU resources, consuming just 6% to 8% of processing power on average, which is very low for a data processing application.

Wondershare Recoverit: Installation and in-use experience

Much like other data recovery software we have tested, Recoverit is also pretty easy to install. You’ll find the free download button on its website, and with just a single click, the installation process is underway.

However, in my testing, Recoverit takes slightly longer to install compared to EaseUS and Stellar. That said, the in-use and navigation experience is better than both applications.

The interface is pretty sleek and modern, with a dark theme. You’ll see all your scannable devices in the central pane. All you have to do is select a drive location to start the scan. I noticed that scanning internal drives was much quicker than external hard disks.

A handy feature that Recoverit offers is AI-based file detection, where you will see a small banner during the scan in which its engine helps pick certain files for you to recover. While this is a feature different from competitors, I did not find it adding much utility to the process.

Once you select the file and click on recover, you’ll need to choose the recovery location, and your files will be recovered almost instantly. However, one complaint is that Recoverit tries to push users towards its paid subscriptions after each scan, which can be pretty irritating after a point.

The biggest drawback, however, is that you must complete the recovery immediately after the scan is done. If you head back to the home page, your current scan results are lost, and you’ll have to start from scratch. It would have been better if the free plan offered a feature to save scans for later use.

Wondershare Recoverit: How we tested

To evaluate performance, I began by installing the free version of Wondershare Recoverit on a Windows 11 machine equipped with 16GB RAM and a 12th Gen Intel Core i5-12500H processor.

For the recovery test, I sourced a Mozart album from the Internet Archive, containing 22 files across multiple formats: 13 JPGs, 4 PNGs, 2 MP3s, 2 FLAC files, and a torrent file. This dataset was transferred to a 1.36 TB NTFS hard drive connected to the system.

After confirming the files were accessible, I permanently deleted the folder and cleared the Recycle Bin to simulate a real-world data loss scenario. I then initiated a scan using Wondershare Recoverit.

With a quick scanning process, Recoverit successfully identified and recovered the entire dataset without any missing files, demonstrating reliable recovery performance under controlled conditions.

Wondershare Recoverit: Photo recovery

As you’ve seen, the user can easily see images and other files that Recoverit has found during the scanning process. You’re also able to instantly start restoration just by clicking in a damaged file – perfect if you can already spot the photos you need. Results are filterable with a broader range of variables than on most other apps, so it’s easier to find your lost images, and you’ll get warned if your disk or drive has any issues.

It’s very easy to use, and Wondershare’s app delivers thorough, in-depth scanning results. This is no surprise when you consider that Wondershare uses 35 data recovery patents to get the job done.

We’ve only got minor issues with scans using this app: In our latest review we were only performing quick scans in a small virtual drive, so results were displayed in seconds. Still, in previous reviews we found scans of larger drives are not particularly fast, especially if you deploy a deep scan.

Photo previews aren’t very well-supported. That’s irritating if you want to look at files before committing to restoration. This is also crucial if you’re simply installing Wondershare Recoverit to check if it can detect your missing files before paying for a subscription. As we mentioned, the free version of the app also refused to restore any files for us, even those well below the promised 100 MB quota.

Still, there are many impressive aspects to Recoverit beyond the interface. It’s been verified to work with more than 2,000 different devices, including PC and Mac drives and SSDs, USB memory sticks, SD cards, cameras and external hard drives – it’ll hunt down photos on virtually anything. It also supports more than 1,000 different file formats, which is extensive. Photographers will be pleased to see RAW, PSD and CRW files among all of the key mainstream formats.

This app works with formatted drives, raw disks, partitions, and drives with invalid partition tables or excessive fragmentation. It works on Windows and Mac, too. Support is also excellent: it’s available 24 hours per day, and it’s free.

There are loads of extra features available, although some are only included at higher payment tiers. You’re able to create bootable disks and USB drives to recover photography from crashed PCs, and there’s also video repair, scanning and fragment merging on offer. Sadly, those video repair options don’t extend to photographs.

If you do want video repair, you can select “Enhanced Recovery” from within the Utility. This will only work for drives though : you can’t choose specific folders. The utility also only supports the more common video formats like MP4, MOV and AVI. There’s a feedback option if you want to request more obscure formats like Theora (OGV).

If the files you’ve recovered are corrupted, you can also try to repair them with Wondershare’s Repairit. This is available as a desktop app, online and via e-mail as a service.

Wondershare Recoverit: Final verdict

Wondershare Recoverit is an affordable data recovery platform that uses advanced machine learning algorithms to find and recover lost data files. It supports more than 1,000+ file formats across various devices, including cameras, external hard drives, and USB sticks.

We found it to be one of the best platforms to recover and reconstruct lost media files, thanks to its pattern-based, repair-driven recovery approach. While most data recovery platforms offer a single license at an average of $65 to $80, the Recoverit license for two PCs starts at $59.99.

The interface is just right for beginners, and the installation process is seamless. However, the free plan only allows 500 MB of data recovery, which isn’t sufficient for most users. In our testing with the free tier, we also didn’t find an option to save scans, which means you’ll have to re-scan the drive if you want to recover files multiple times.

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