Wondershare Data Recovery Review

Wondershare Data Recovery ranks as one of the most popular data recovery tools available. That popularity rests primarily on its budget-friendly pricing (for PC) and a friendly wizard. Intrigued, we decided to download and put Wondershare to the test to see how it measured up against more expensive solutions like those put out by Stellar and EaseUS.

If you’re wondering what a data recovery tool can do for you, be sure and check out our best data recovery software roundup. In a nutshell, though, data recovery solutions are generally used to recover accidentally or system-deleted files, corrupted, deleted or formatted partitions, or data on crashed hard drives.

We examined Wondershare’s license options, features, user experience and customer support over the course of our review. We also performed multiple scans to see if it actually did what it was supposed to.

We have to admit, we were impressed what Wondershare Data Recovery could do for its price. It doesn’t nearly match up with pricier tools in terms of features and speed and it probably won’t appeal to IT professionals or serious techies; but for a layman in a bind, it gets the job done.

Alternatives for Wondershare Data Recovery

Pricing & Licensing

Wondershare provides separate data recovery licenses for PC and Mac users. They have both single computer options and licenses for multiple computers. These are aimed at families and businesses.

Wondershare has many more recovery licenses for their Mac recovery software for businesses, with the largest option being for 100+ computers (requires quote). Strangely, it doesn’t offer the same purchasing options for the PC software.

If you want to try the software before you buy, a trial version is available. You can only recover up to 100MB of data with the trial, but you can at least see if the files you want are available before purchasing a license.

Features

Despite being a budget data recovery tool, Wondershare Data Recovery still offers plenty of features. However, that’s more true of its Mac software, which costs about what a higher-tier tool would.

One of the best reasons to buy Wondershare over other solutions is that it supports mobile device recovery for Android and iOS — called Dr. Fone — and can also recover data from MP3 players and digital cameras. Notable missing features that other data recovery solutions, like Stellar Data Recovery, do include are hard drive cloning, startup-disk recovery for non-booting computers and optical media recovery (read our Stellar Data Recovery review for the full picture).

There’s also no option add new file types to the scan process. That shouldn’t be an issue, though, as Wondershare supports recovery of over 550 different file types. These include:

• Documents: DOC/DOCX, XLS/XLSX, PPT/PPTX, PDF, CWK, HTML/HTM, INDD, EPS, etc.
• Images: JPG, TIFF/TIF, PNG, BMP, GIF, PSD, CRW, CR2, NEF, ORF, RAF, SR2, MRW, DCR, WMF, DNG, ERF, RAW, etc.
• Video: AVI, MOV, MP4, M4V, 3GP, 3G2, WMV, ASF, FLV, SWF, MPG, RM/RMVB, etc.
• Audio: AIF/AIFF, M4A, MP3, WAV, WMA, MID/MIDI, OGG, AAC, etc.
• Email: PST, DBX, EMLX, etc.
• Archives: ZIP, RAR, SIT, etc.

File systems supported include all of the major ones:

• Windows: FAT16, FAT32, NTFS
• Mac: HFS, HFS+
• External Media: exFAT

Linux file systems — EXT2, EXT3 — are not supported.

Recovery Process

During this segment, we’ll examine the basic experience of using the Wondershare wizard. While no means comprehensive, this should give you a good idea of the software’s look and feel. After you boot up Wondershare Data Recovery, you’ll be asked to choose a file type to recover.

Many data recovery tools don’t include this step, though they should. Scanning for specific file types helps speed up the process. For our tests, though, we decided to scan for all file types. The next step asks you to pick a scan location.

Again, there are some nice options to customize the scan. Search by “recycle bin” to find files you deleted, external drive or specify a location. If you’re dealing with a deleted partition, pick “I can’t find my partition.” On the next screen, you’ll be asked to select your drive.

Then, Wondershare will pull information from your device’s partition table to show you want partitions it can see.

Drive letters won’t be available, so you’ll have to guess which partition is the one you want based on size. No drive names is normal for recovery software. Your deleted partition will show up here, unless the volume it occupied has already been overwritten.

Going back to the “choose location” step, by selecting the “in a specified location” option, you can also browse and select partitions by their partition letter. This won’t help you with lost partitions but it will help you with non-mounting ones.

For illustrate the rest of the scan process, we selected our “D” partition, which is where we created and deleted a few test files. Hitting the “next” button lets us choose to “enable deep scan.” Doing so broadens the scanning algorithm to search your drive sector by sector. If you don’t enable this option, Wondershare Data Recovery does a more limited “quick scan,” instead.

Usually, a quick scan should be your first attempt to recover lost data, since it runs much faster. Once you’ve started your scan, a progress bar at the top of the tool shows the percentage of scan complete. An estimated countdown shows you how much time the scan has remaining.

While the scan runs, you can view recovered files in the preview pane. On-the-fly previewing is another useful trick than many more expensive recovery tools don’t include.

Another convenience we like: whether the scan is in progress or done, you can review recovered files by both file type and path. Many tools limit you to path. There’s also a search field at the top. Deleted files are recreated with generic file names, though, so this feature is really only useful in cases where your files and file system are intact.

One thing we didn’t like is that Wondershare doesn’t let you filter results by only displaying deleted files. While you can find files you’ve personally deleted in the recycle bin folder, finding files deleted by a program is impossible unless you know exactly what folder that file should be in.

To recover any document, just click the corresponding check box and hit the “recover” button. You’ll have to save to a partition or drive separate from the one scanned.

If you’re not ready to recover, you can save your scan results to process later. This will save you from having to rerun the scan. Overall, Wondershare has created a simple user experience that anybody should be able to navigate with ease.

Performance

We tested Wondershare’s quick and deep scans on our data partition to benchmark its performance. These tests were run on a 518 GB partition on our test computer, which had 379 GB of used space. Prior to running the partition scans, we created and deleted three test files: a Word doc, a .jpg image and a .mp4 video.

We also created and deleted a small, 10.76GB test partition to see if Wondershare could find it. Finally, we ran a deep scan against our entire 1TB hard drive to check run time. Here are our results:

All of our deleted test files were found with a quick scan, which ran in just a few seconds. Wondershare’s deep scan took a whopping 7.5 hours to run, though. A full hard-drive scan took 11 hours. These times are much longer than leading data recovery tools like Stellar and EaseUS (read our EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard review for more on this product).

Note that, generally speaking, runtime doesn’t predicate the success or thoroughness of a data recovery solution algorithm, either.

Customer Support

Help using Data Recovery can be found by visiting Wondershare’s support site. Separate categories for user manuals and FAQs are provided, along with a search tool to find information more quickly. The online user manuals compliment written and video tutorials. While a touch shallow, Wondershare earns bonus points for easy navigation.

If you can’t find the answers to your questions, you can submit email inquiries 24/7. However, the Wondershare support team isn’t exactly prompt in getting back to you. Two inquires your reviewer submitted went unanswered for two weeks until they were sent a reminder.

That reminder did lead to a prompt reply, however, which stated that there were was a system error of some kind.

There’s also no option for live chat or a tech support telephone number. If you’re using data recovery software for your business, you’ll likely be better off spending more on a solution with more active support.

Final Thoughts

The Wondershare Data Recovery wizard might be as well-designed as any. The tool is very intuitive and offers excellent granularity to tailor scans to your needs. We love the ability to scan by file type and scenario. Where the tool most falls short, though, is pretty big. Deep scan times are long running and support is bad.

Some key features like startup disc recovery and drive cloning are also missing. While Wondershare’s PC software might make sense if you’re on a budget, IT professionals and those who place high value on their data should consider more robust and well-supported data-recovery tools like those supported by Stellar Data Recovery and Prosoft Engineering Data Rescue (read our Prosoft Engineering Data Rescue review).

Have you used Wondershare? What did you think? Let us know in the comments below and thank you for reading.