Stellar Review - A Powerful Data Recovery System

Most of us store valuable data on our phones and computers. While losing it can have terrible consequences, trying to recover it on your own is the real pain in the neck.

Luckily, there are great tools for data recovery that can help you with that, and many Stellar Data Recovery reviews claim that this software is among the best.

Whether you need it for personal use or you’re an IT expert working for a large company, Stellar has a solution for you.

Dive into our detailed review to learn what else makes this tool so awesome.

What Is Stellar?

Stellar Data Recovery is a software-based recovery service owned by the company Stellar Information Technology Pvt. Ltd. It’s a tool that can bring back files lost due to deletion, drive damage, formatting, virus infections, and others.

Previously known as Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery, the software is most popular among Windows users.

But today, it offers data recovery services for Windows, macOS, and iOS.

How Does Stellar Work?

The Stellar recovery service is a do-it-yourself (DIY) tool. After choosing one of the products, you have to install the software application, which is a very quick and easy thing to do.

Stellar performs two main actions—first, it scans the selected drives, and then it recovers the lost data. It’s that simple.

But keep in mind that not everything can be recovered unless you run backups—overwritten data or files from damaged drives are almost certainly a lost cause no matter which software you use.

In the following section of this Stellar Data Recovery review for 2022, we at Web Tribunal will tell you more about this product’s features.

Features

Whether you need Stellar for individual use or for your business, checking out its features can help you decide which product to purchase. Let’s take a look at what Stellar has in store for you.

Supported Devices

Before the macOS and iOS versions became available, Stellar only supported Windows and Android.

Unfortunately, the Android app isn’t available anymore. Although it still appears on the website, it can't restore information from the phone's internal memory; it can only be used for recovering data from SD cards, according to the Stellar support team.

The good news is that the software, previously known as Stellar Phoenix Windows, still exists, improved and updated. Some of the devices the current Windows version supports include:

• CD, DVD, HDDVD, Blu-ray Disc
• Hard drive (external, internal)
• HDD
• SSD
• SD cards, all types
• USB drives
• NTFS, exFAT & FAT (FAT16/FAT32) 
• RAID 0, 5, and 6
• Supports creation of virtual RAID
• RAW partitions
• Linux and Mac drives (HFS, HFS+, ext2, ext3, ext4)
• Virtual drive recovery 

Stellar Data Recovery was available for Windows only, but now it supports the following devices for Mac:

• HDD 
• SDD
• SD cards, all types
• Fusion drive (hybrid drive)
• Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) and other USB storage media
• High storage capacity (>5 TB) Mac storage drives
• NTFS, Ex FAT & FAT(FAT16/FAT32)
• APFS (Sparse File support)
• HFS & HFS+
• Crashed drives
• Non-booting mac using a recovery drive

Stellar phone data recovery supports:

• iOS (13.x and below versions)
• iPhones (iPhone 4 and above), iPads, iPods
• iCloud, iTunes

Supported File Formats

Stellar Data Recovery supports numerous file categories and types. You can find the full list of the 200+ supported file types on Stellarinfo.com. Here are a few examples:

Stellar Windows Recovery supports these and more:

• Acrobat: PDF
• Archive: ZIP, RAR, TAR, 7Z
• Audio: WAV, WMA, MP3
• Database: MDB, DBF
• Email: PST, MBOX, EMLX
• Image: JPG, JPEG, TIF, TIFF, PSD, RAW
• Video: AVI, WMV, MPEG, MPG
• Miscellaneous: MHTML, QDF, TXT
• Documents: DOCX, PPTX, DOCM, ODT

Supported file categories for Mac, and some examples of file types: 

• Photo: PSD, JPEG, JPG, RAW, TIFF, TIF
• Audio: MP3, WAV, WMA
• Video: MOV, MP4, MKV
• Documents: MDB, CWK, FMT, QBB, WPD
• Archive: ZIP, RAR, TAR, 7Z
• Application: EMLX, PST, DBX
• Text & other formats: DBF, HLP, MHT, JSP

Stellar iPhone Data Recovery supports:

• Photos, videos, contacts, call logs, text messages, photo stream, voice memos, camera roll, installed apps data, notes & reminders, calendar, facetime calls, and Safari bookmarks
• WhatsApp, WeChat, Line, Viber, Tango, and Kik messages & attachments
• iCloud and iTunes files

Scanning Options

Stellar does a quick scan by default and has an optional deep scan.

Stellar Phoenix Recovery’s quick scan is very fast, but it has limited capabilities—it’s useful for finding recently deleted files only. The deep scan can take up a few hours, but it is much more powerful.

With it, you can filter the search by common locations, connected drives, etc. Scanning for connected drives allows you to find deleted and lost partitions.

All in all, both options can be useful depending on your needs.

Recovery Capabilities

Stellar Data Recovery Reviews praise the software for its numerous options for data recovery. In addition to recovering deleted files and lost partitions, Stellar can restore data from any storage media.

With this software, you can have a recovery drive, with which you can then create bootable USB media for data recovery from crashed or corrupted devices.

Stellar provides RAID 0, 5 & 6 data restoration for Windows users. With this feature, it’s possible to create a virtual RAID to easily recover your files from damaged arrays. 

Besides that, with Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery, you can restore files from formatted devices, lost partitions, or corrupted storage.

Windows users can restore data from BitLocker encrypted drives and virtual drives.

Stellar can also decrypt encrypted drives using certificates and then easily recover files. 

The software offers recovery from virtual machines for Windows. Stellar Phoenix can perform database recovery, as well as restore data from VMware and Microsoft virtual image files. You can also recover data from CDs, DVDs, HD DVDs, and Blu-ray discs.

But that’s not all—this tool provides two more options: disk cloning and creating a disk image. With the former, the software clones the hard drive in case of a potential drive failure. The latter allows users to create an image of a whole disk/volume or just some parts of it.

Are you feeling overwhelmed yet?

These are just some of the many features the software has.

Keep reading our detailed Stellar Recovery review to find out what we think about its speed and file deletion capabilities.

Speed

The quick scan lasts only a few minutes and it can scan partitions of your choice.

To give you the full picture in this Stellar Data Recovery review, we tested the deep scan and discovered that it could take up to a few hours.

We scanned 406.7GB of files in 930GB of available storage in just shy of four hours, which is much longer than we expected.

But keep in mind that the speed depends on the computer configuration, not only on the software, so this might be different on your device.

Also, you can always try the quick scan first—its speed is quite satisfactory. If you'd like something a bit faster, you can check out our TenorShare review.

File Deletion

For file deletion, Stellar offers the Bitraser File Eraser—a flexible software that allows you to wipe out your whole PC and external drive. You can erase files, folders, web browsing history, saved passwords, photos, videos, identity documents, app traces and cookies, and more.

It’s available for Mac and Windows, comes with a 30-day free trial, and can be purchased separately for $29.99.

Most Stellar Data Recovery reviews acknowledge that this is a great tool and, most importantly, a useful feature for preventing data leakage!

Ease of Use

Stellar has a very intuitive and straightforward user interface.

Installing the desktop client is fast and simple once you find it on its website. But this can be a challenge—the website not easy to navigate and the information is organized in a confusing way.

There is a free edition which we tested for this Stellar Recovery review and free versions of every paid plan. The initial scanning is easy to run since it’s displayed on the dashboard.

The free versions allow you to preview data before recovering it, which is great. From the settings, you can turn off the preview, select or deselect specific files, resume recovery, add an activation key, and more—you can easily customize the software to your needs.

Throughout our research for this Stellar Phoenix review, we were enjoying how easy and accessible it was to use the tool. The only challenge we faced was finding the necessary information on its official website.

Stellar Free vs Premium

Stellar has free demo versions of each plan.

But there’s a catch—you can’t use it for recovery. You can only scan and preview your lost data.

The great thing that users praise in numerous Stellar Data Recovery reviews is the completely free plan. Stellar also has different plans for individuals and businesses. We’ll cover all of them below, so you can see which one fits your needs best.

That being said, the division between individual and business plans seems to be arbitrary since even Stellar’s support agents couldn’t tell us what the difference between them is.

Business plans are pricey and they include pretty much the same perks as the more advanced individual plans.

So, we’d recommend the Free, Standard, and Professional plans for individual use and the Premium, Technician, and Toolkit packages for business purposes.

Stellar Plans for Individual Use

Stellar Plans for Business Use

The Business plans are organized in a completely different way. We couldn’t possibly describe all of them in detail as it is beyond the scope of our Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery review, but we’ll give you an overview to help you get an idea of what to expect.

For business owners, the company decided to group their products according to their primary function. There are email repair, email converter, file repair, and data recovery & erasure services, as well as several toolkits. Each service has different packages, specialized in a particular function or product. 

For example, the data recovery and erasure service includes data recovery, data erasure, file erasure, virtual machine recovery, and mobile erasure. Each of them comes with a free version and several paid plans varying in price and features.

For the purposes of this Stellar Recovery review, we’ll focus on the Data Recovery Toolkit.

With this plan, you get all the benefits included in the individual plans, plus virtual drive recovery and the opportunity to restore data from Windows, as well as Linux and Mac Drives (HFS, HFS+, ext2, ext3, ext4). This plan will set you back $299/year, but it’s the most advanced package you can get.

Although Stellar offers more options for Windows users, as it’s growing, it develops more and more products for Mac, and it even has a few solutions for Linux.

The company hasn’t neglected mobile users either; there are a few more plans available for iOS.

Stellar Plans for iOS

Numerous Stellar Data Recovery reviews show that users appreciate the variety of plans and features this product has. And in case any issues arise during the complex process of data recovery, Stellar support will be there to help you.

Support

Stellar support is available via live chat, email, and phone. Besides, the company has a comprehensive knowledge base and an FAQ section for each product.

The live chat is available 24/7 but only for online payment-related issues, while tech support works five days a week. That’s still pretty good, but it means you can’t contact them during the weekends.

A common complaint in Stellar Recovery reviews is that the website is cluttered. That was also the reason we contacted support agents on several occasions.

Our experience with Stellar’s tech support is that its quality depends on the agent. Although they all answered promptly, they weren’t very helpful. On the contrary, they were quite confusing. Only one managed to answer our question.

We can only guess it depends on how lucky you are to run into a competent agent.

The good thing is that the agents are very quick to respond, which can help in case of an emergency.

Combined with the knowledge base, your problem can be solved easily.

Stellar User Reviews

Stellar Data Recovery reviews, especially on Reddit, are split. User opinions about the Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery support team are no exception—some praise the support they received, others criticize it.

The thing that everyone appreciates is that Stellar can recover data from all sorts of media. On the other hand, some users find the software too expensive and complain about the speed of the deep scan. But opinions on this matter vary too, so we can only assume that it depends on the amount of data users have tried to scan or recover.

When to Use Stellar

Whether you are an individual who needs data recovery software for personal use, or an IT expert, you can benefit from Stellar’s products.

With its recent inclusion of Apple users, you can now use Stellar on both Windows and Mac.

From recovering photos, personal documentation, systems, and even a lost disk partition to saving data before drive failure—Stellar has it all.

Don’t hesitate to try out the Free edition or demo version of one of the many plans before you decide which one you want to purchase. To help you make an informed decision, we’ve covered this in more detail in the pricing section of our Stellar Phoenix review.

Stellar Alternatives

Stellar is a great data recovery tool, but if you’re not convinced it’s the right fit for you, check out some of its alternatives.

Stellar Data Recovery vs EaseUS

EaseUS has a lot of interesting features. However, it is more business-oriented, while Stellar has relatively affordable plans for individual use.

Stellar Data Recovery vs Remo

Remo is slightly more expensive than Stellar, but it has both free and paid plans and it’s better for individual use. With its numerous recovery and repairing options, it’s a great tool to have at your disposal.

Final Verdict

Stellar Data Recovery is a feature-rich tool that can save your precious data. It’s flexible, DIY software, so it doesn’t matter if you’re an individual or an IT expert—you’ll be able to use it easily.

Stellar Data Recovery reviews often highlight its availability for Windows, macOS, and iOS and the fact that there are some—although limited—solutions for Linux and Android, as its most significant advantage to other software. 

As we saw, all plans are packed with useful features, so regardless of your level of experience or OS, you’ll be able to find a plan that suits your needs.

Our only concerns are that it might be too pricey for some people and that the tech support quality could be better.

Other than that, it’s a reliable product that can help in various disastrous situations. If you want to try it out before you buy it, you can download the Free plan or any of the free demo versions.