Remo Recover Review

In this Remo Recover review, we’ll examine one of the many applications out there that claim to quickly recover all your lost files. We look at the cost and features of Remo Recover for Windows, in particular, using the company’s “Pro” edition. In the process of our testing, we also evaluated the overall user experience and performance, too.

The end results weren’t very impressive, unfortunately. While the feature set doesn’t quite measure up to the top options mentioned in our best data recovery software guide, the bigger issues we encountered stem from a client that’s sloppy in design and prone to crashes, particularly when running full drive scans for deleted partitions.

Whether you’re a home consumer looking to get out of a jam or an IT professional looking to build your toolbox, we recommend checking out Stellar Data Recovery instead, a company that nails user experience with a capable and, more importantly, reliable recovery tool (read our Stellar Data Recovery review).

If Stellar doesn’t meet your needs, EaseUS and Prosoft Engineering are two other services of note that we like for users of all technical skill levels. If you’d like to avoid using any of these products altogether, we recommend reading our piece on 3-2-1 backup or our best online backup guide.

Alternatives for Remo Recover

Pricing & Licensing

Remo provides data recovery software for Windows, Mac and Android, with separate licenses for each. The Windows recovery software, the focus of this review, comes in three different license packages: Basic Edition, Media Edition and Remo Recovery Pro. Each license is good for life.

Unlike many of the better software products out there, Remo doesn’t let you try the software out for free. So you can’t run a scan first to see if your files are recoverable and then purchase the software to complete the recovery.

That means you kind of just have to hope it works. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee, but only in the event that you discover a defect with the software, not if your files are beyond the point of recovery, which does happen.

That’s probably a good reason to consider other options first, even though they’ll likely be a little more expensive. Stellar Data Recovery, EaseUS and Prosoft Engineering, the three top recovery solutions we’ve reviewed, all cost around $99 for editions comparable to Remo Recovery Pro. We recommend you check out our EaseUS Data Recovery review and Prosoft Engineering Data Rescue review for more on these two.

Features

Remo Recover provides many of the basic features you’d expect from a data recovery program, including the ability to perform quick scans to recover deleted files and deep scan algorithms to reconstruct RAW data.

There are some missing features, too, that most impact ease of use. We’ll discuss some of the many issues we had with the Remo Recovery process when we talk ease of use, later in this review, but some of the misses include inability to scan by file type and no option to preview files before completing the recovery process.

The following table summarizes all of the features you’ll get with Remo Recover.

Recovery Process

To say the Remo Recovery client isn’t exactly eye candy is a bit of an understatement. The color scheme could use some serious rethinking, but the bigger problem is the text doesn’t fit the client, making it hard to figure out exactly what to do at various points through the recovery process.

There’s no way to adjust the application’s window size to fix these issues, either. At least, not earlier on: a few steps into the process, you can resize the screen horizontally and vertically, though that doesn’t fix all the problems.

Presentation isn’t everything, but it isn’t nothing, either, even for utility software. Be prepared to have to guess some if you go with Remo as your data recovery solution.

To begin the recovery process, you’ll click one of three buttons: recover files, recover drives or recover photos. That last option should actually read “recover media,” since its used to recover video and audio as well.

Select “recover files” and you’ll be promted to choose one of two options: recover deleted files and recover lost files. These labels aren’t exactly clear and the descriptions as to what they do are cut off, of course.

Basically, the first works as a quick scan, while the second is a deep scan.

The difference is that a deep scan performs RAW recovery, moving through your drive one sector at a time to reconstruct files based on file patterns. Choose this option for deleted or formatted partitions.

Pick the first (quick scan) option and you’ll next be asked to choose which partition you want to scan.

After, you’ll be able to choose which folders you want to scan. You can choose to scan the entire drive by clicking the topmost checkbox in the left-pane navigation tree.

For deleted item recovery, you’ll want to make sure you’ve at least got the recycle bin folder checked (rather than the folder the deleted files were in originally).

Next, you’ll be asked to indicate a recovery folder. In case you’re recovering to a folder where files already exist, you can choose options like “overwrite” and “prompt” to replace duplicate files. You can also compress recovered data in a .zip file if you prefer.

Click the forward arrow and you’re scan will kick off. Assuming you’re doing a quick scan, it should only take a few seconds to run in our experience (see performance, below).

After the quick scan completes, the recovery folder you indicated will open so that you can browse the results. This approach is a bit different from how most recovery programs work, which don’t automatically recover the files after your scan completes.

Instead, programs like Prosoft Engineering Data Rescue let you review and even preview the scan results in the client first, and select which files you want to recover. Data Rescue also has filtering options and a search feature to sort through data more quickly; Remo does not.

While that’s an area of improvement for the quick scan process, the bigger issues we ran into with Remo had to do with its deep scan operations.

Remo Recover Deep Scan Options

If you choose to run a deep scan by selecting “recover drives” on the Remo home screen, you’ll be given the option to run two different types of scans: partition recovery and formatted/reformatted recovery.

Partition recovery is used to recover accidentally deleted partitions, while formatted recovery is used to recover partitions that have been reformatted. Generally speaking, with any recovery software the success of either will depend on whether or not the physical memory that stored your old files has been overwritten; if so, you’re out of luck, which is one reason it’s always best to be prepared with a backup solution rather than thinking you can rely on recovery software.

If you run a partition recovery scan, you’ll be able to choose which types of files you want to scan for. This can help speed up what can be a pretty lengthy process, in addition to limiting your recovery output. However, as far as we can tell, there’s no way to simply scan for every file type: you have to go through and check off every file extension you want to scan for.

We could be wrong about that, however: the design of the client is, once again, too crammed, making the process something of a guessing game.

Worse, as we’ll discuss next, we were never able to actually complete a full drive scan.

Performance

We ran both quick and deep scans using Remo to test both scan speed and, more importantly, the tool’s ability to recover deleted items.

To test the quick scan process, we created and deleted several different test files, including document, image and video files. These tests were run against a small test partition we setup, which was 1.95GB in size with about half of that space free. The drive itself was a 250GB SSD.

Here are the results:

Our quick scan tests went smoothly enough, despite some confusion cause by that clumsy client design. In each case, we were able to find our deleted items.

However, as mentioned, we ran into problems trying to run full drive scans to find deleted partitions. In each of a half dozen tries, the client crashed after about two minutes of scan time.

We reached out to support for some help but weren’t able to fix the issue and left it at that. For one, we didn’t want to keep running failed scans for fear it could damage our hard drive. Additionally, when dealing with lost data, working with buggy software is the last thing you want, and no other recovery software we’ve tested has had these issues.

As such, we can’t recommend the product for partition recovery, only deleted file recovery, which really isn’t worth the cost itself (especially with some of the client’s design issues).

Customer Support

Remo provides 24/7 support via email. The company is based in Bangalore, India, which we assume is where the support centers are as well. There’s no option for live chat or telephone support like you’ll get with Stellar Data Recovery and some other tools.

We shot off a test question to support regarding the crash problems we were experiencing during the full drive scan process. Impressively, we got a response back within four minutes.

Unfortunately, the response didn’t help. The agent advised us that Remo will crash when there are many bad sectors, interference from other programs and low RAM. We shut down all of our programs and still experienced crashes, and the test computer we were running on was only a year old.

Further, we ran a couple of tests using other software, too, including Wondershare Data Recovery (read our Wondershare review) and didn’t experience any similar issues.

Remo also maintains a support site. The knowledgebase is somewhat limited and rife with grammatical errors, however.

We did find a section on crashes, though, which Remo states is a known issue, with several suggestions for fixing the problem. However, as with the support response, none of those suggestions helped us get around our crash issues.

Final Thoughts

The absence of better file sorting features and file previews only serves to bolster our impression that Remo Recover is the worst kind of utility tool: one that skimps entirely on user experience and makes you feel like you’ve warped back in time the early 90s.

The bigger, issue, as mentioned, is that Remo Recovery just doesn’t work, at least not without potentially a good deal of troubleshooting that you really shouldn’t have to bother with. The crashes when trying to deep scan our drive is by far the most pressing problem since it renders the software useless in most cases.

Whether you’re an IT professional or home user, we’d recommend spending on a more user-friendly tool and one that works without hiccup. While Stellar Data Recovery is our personal favorite, EaseUS and Prosoft Engineering are great for IT users, and Wondershare is a cheap, reliable solution that’ll do the trick for the average consumer.

Let us know what you think about Remo Recover in the comments below, and thanks for reading!