The standard model is a free scan that finds your files, previews them, and then asks for payment to write them out. That is not dishonest, but it is worth knowing before you start.
Almost every commercial tool follows the same pattern, and the paywall arrives at the point you are most invested. A few tools are genuinely free, with real limitations of their own.
Recuva, Disk Drill, EaseUS, Stellar and the rest all offer a free scan. It genuinely works — the tool reads the drive, reconstructs what it can and shows you thumbnails or a file tree. What varies is the point at which you pay. Some cap recovery by volume, commonly 500 MB or 1 GB, which is often enough for documents and nowhere near enough for photos or video. Others allow no saving at all without a licence.
The useful part of a free scan is decision-making rather than recovery: if the scan finds your files and previews them correctly, the data is intact and it becomes a question of price. If the scan finds nothing, or the previews are corrupt, that tells you something no licence will fix.
PhotoRec is free with no cap at all, carving files by signature. It is powerful and unfriendly — a command-line tool that returns files without their names or folders. TestDisk, from the same project, repairs partition tables and can un-delete from some file systems; it is capable and genuinely dangerous in the wrong hands, because it writes. Recuva’s free version has no volume cap and a normal interface, though it is Windows-only and development has been slow.
Between them these cover most situations where software is the right answer at all — provided you use them read-only and against a healthy drive.
Every scanning tool works by reading the drive intensively, often for hours. On a healthy drive that is harmless. On a drive with failing heads or spreading bad sectors it is the worst possible thing to do: the scan drags a struggling mechanism across every sector it has, and drives regularly die partway through a recovery scan that was meant to save them.
So the question to settle before choosing software is not which tool, but whether the drive is physically sound. If it clicks, ticks, grinds, gets unusually hot, or disappears and reappears, no software is safe and the correct move is to stop.
If the drive is making noise, if it holds the only copy of something irreplaceable, or if a scan has already been run without success, further attempts have a poor expected value. A professional recovery starts by imaging the drive read-only, so every subsequent attempt runs against a copy — which is the fundamental difference and the reason it can afford to be thorough.
A single drive is from £300 +VAT after a free 48-hour diagnostic and a written quote, and most jobs are no fix, no fee. We will also tell you when software would have done the job perfectly well.
The scan usually is; saving your files usually is not. Most tools let you scan and preview at no cost, then cap recovery by volume or require a licence to write anything out. PhotoRec and TestDisk are genuinely free with no cap, and Recuva’s free version is uncapped on Windows.
PhotoRec for carving files by signature with no limits, TestDisk for partition repair, and Recuva if you want a conventional interface on Windows. PhotoRec returns files without names or folders, which is the trade for it being genuinely unrestricted.
No. Scanning reads the drive intensively for hours, and on a drive with failing heads or spreading bad sectors that is exactly the stress that finishes it. If it clicks, grinds, gets hot or drops out, stop — the drive needs imaging before anything reads it again.
On a different drive from the one you are recovering, and recover the files to a different drive too. Installing onto the affected drive can overwrite the data you are trying to save, which is the commonest self-inflicted loss we see.
When the drive is physically failing, when it holds the only copy of something irreplaceable, or when a scan has already failed. A lab images the drive read-only first, so every attempt runs against a copy rather than the original — which is what software cannot do.