Stellar Data Recoveryhas announced the latest release of its free data recovery software for Windows and macOS devices.
The new free-to-use package enables users to search for and preview lost or deleted files prior to restoration, and it can be used on internal drives as well as external storage devices, like USB sticks. It's based on Stellar Data Recovery 9.0.0.4, which was released in May 2020 and features a deep scan tool that's 72% faster than the preceding edition of the program.
The unpaid version of the software enables users to restore up to 1GB of lost information, but a paid upgrade of at least $49.99 is required to go beyond that limit.
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According to Sunil Chandna, Stellar’s CEO, the company wants to ensure that users who can’t afford premium data recovery software still have some way to restore their files.
Stellar upgrade
This isn’t the first time that Stellar has offered a free data recovery package for desktops. Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Free Edition, as the program used to be known, also came with file restoration support for up to 1GB of data and worked with numerous file types.
In fact, Stellar’s just-released Free Data Recovery tool lacks two key features that have previously come standard with free Stellar data recovery packages, namely the ability to recover data from lost partitions and formatted drives.
Although users will have to upgrade to the $49.99 Standard package to restore data from lost partitions, the trade-off is that Stellar Data Recovery Free can now be used to retrieve data from BitLocker-protected volumes. BitLocker is a volume encryption feature that comes built-in to Windows to prevent unauthorized access to devices. By default, it uses a 128-bit AES key to secure information.
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