Stellar Data Recovery has announced the latest version of its free data recovery software for Windows and macOS devices. The new free package allows users to find and preview lost or deleted files before recovery, and can be used on internal drives as well as external storage devices such as USB sticks. It is based on Stellar Data Recovery 9.0.0.4, which was released in May 2020 and has a 72% faster in-depth scan tool than the previous edition of the program. The non-paid version of the software allows users to restore up to 1 GB of lost data, but a paid upgrade of at least €49.99 is required to exceed this limit. According to Sunil Chandna, CEO of Stellar, the company wants to make sure that users who can't afford premium data recovery software always have a way to restore their files.
Stellar upgrade
This is not the first time that Stellar has offered a free data recovery package for desktop computers. Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Free Edition, as the program was previously known, also included file recovery media for up to 1 GB of data and worked with many file types. In fact, the newly released Stellar data recovery tool is missing two key features that were previously provided as 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 standard package at €49.99 to restore data from lost partitions, the downside is that Stellar Data Recovery Free can now be used to recover data from BitLocker-protected volumes. BitLocker is a volume encryption feature built into Windows to prevent unauthorized access to devices. By default, it uses a 128-bit AES key to protect the information.