Top 10 free data recovery software for Windows and Mac

Intuitive User Interface

This data recovery software makes a great balance between pragmatism and aestheticism. With no redundant and complex tabs, iBoysoft Data Recovery makes it easy to find the target feature when you need to recover data from external HDDs.

During the read-only scanning, this free data recovery program categorizes the found files and information in the left side bar, with a search box to quickly locate the pieces you lost. This user-friendly design is great for people who don’t know much about tech knowledge.

Impressive performance

For testing, we purposely lost files in thee situations:

1. Empty deleted files from Recycle bin (Windows) and Trash (Mac)
2. Clear the external hard drive by reformatting
3. Make the disk RAW by corrupting its file system

In all the situations, iBoysoft Data Recovery recovers lost files with average 97% success rate. Therefore, it's a good free option for your Seagate, WD, Toshiba and other brands of external hard drives. iBoysoft Data Recovery also can recover files from hard drives, USB drives, SD cards, memory cards, CF cards, SanDisk cards, memory sticks, etc.

Advanced encrypted hard drive recovery

Except for the regular features, we find its advanced encrypted hard drive recovery is also powerful. iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac allows APFS encrypted hard drive recovery. And its Windows version allows to recover data from BitLocker encrypted external hard drives. Surely, both are presumed that you know the correct password for privacy.

Free file undelete software

Recuva developed by Piriform allows you to undelete files from emptied the Recycle Bin, including emails, music, documents, videos, photos, and more. Also, it claims can even recover files from damaged external hard drives with great chance.

Advanced overwrite feature

In addition to file recovery, Recuva works when you want a file gone for good. Its overwrite feature uses industry- and military-standard deletion techniques, which makes sure that your files on the external hard drive has been erased securely.

Recuva is 100% free for personal use. However, it's not that good speaking of formatted and corrupted external drives data recovery. It sometimes misnames files and shows too many files. Premium technical support requires an paid update to professional edition and secure deletion features only available in commercial CCleaner.

PhotoRec, a companion program to TestDisk, works amazingly on Windows, Mac, Linux, and other platforms. It's not a photo recovery tool for Mac or Windows, but also a recovery software for documents, videos, and other file formats from hard disks or removable media.

It goes after the underlying data when the file system of the external hard drive has been severely damaged or reformatted. So, if your external hard drive is formatted with FAT32, NTFS, exFAT, ext2/ext3/ext4, and HFS+, you can give this free software a try.

But you should know that PhotoRec will restores all detected files automatically. There is no option like others that allows you pick the specific one or two pieces to recover.

Tree and list view

Similar to iBoysoft Data Recovery, this freeware uses tree view feature to show the original path of the deleted files. In this way, you can navigate the results as if you're looking at actual files on your computer File browser. Then you can find the deleted files, and select the exact files that you wish to restore.

Full paths of deleted files

Puran File Recovery offers a second option for data recover, which recovers files with Folder Structure and keeps the original folder path intact. For instance, you are restoring a file deleted from the folder C:\Files\Videos, the restored file will be placed in a folder called Files\Videos.

Comparing the advantages and disadvantages, you can give a shot on Puran File Recovery if you are looking for free external hard drive data recovery software.

Different from its companion program PhotoRec that is for recovering individual files, TestDisk put more attention on file system and partition scheme.

It fixes partition tables, recovers deleted partitions, recovers FAT32 and NTFS boot sectors, rebuilds FAT12/FAT16/FAT32/NTFS, and locates ext2/ext3/ext4 backup SuperBlock. This free external hard drive performances well in recovering recently deleted files and converting RAW to NTFS/FAT32.

Although its command line user interface can be quite complex and unfriendly for beginners, novices can use TestDisk to collect detailed information about a non-booting drive before you send it to a tech for further analysis, and for experts, it's a practical on-site recovery tool.

This freeware claims file recovery of all types, including: DOC, XLS, RTF, PDF, PPT, MDB, HTML, CSV, TXT, PAS, CPP, EML; audio and video files: AVI, MP3, WAV, WMA, MPG, MOV, ASF; image files: JPEG, JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF, TIF, TGA, EML, RAW, and so on.

However, our testing result on this program is less than satisfactory. But since it's a free solution to recover data from external hard drives, its performance is acceptable.

In terms of extras, you'll notice this free solution does "pro" things but charge no "pro" fee. Specifically, there features will draw your attention.

File Rescue and Media Recover Wizard

This is a feature that you can make use of in recovering data from external hard drives or any other media. It's able to search for the types of files and reduce the size of the data list, which does you a favor when sorting for lost files and media.

Other features like Deleted File Search and Mail Rescue make this recovery tool even better. It also includes a Files Wiper that allows you to permanently delete files when you want to do so. All in all, it's worth checking out, even though UndeleteMyFiles may not be the best of the bunch.

But more things should be noticed. There is no preview option from Ontrack EasyRecovery before you recover files from the external hard drive. That's to say, there is no guarantee that the recovered data is not corrupt.

Meanwhile, it's recognized that Ontrack EasyRecovery sometimes would crash if the hard drive's capacity or the number of the files is too large during out tests. Also, because this product doesn't support files scan by file type, some Microsoft Word documents are found confusingly under the Applications folder.

Generally speaking, if you take advantage of its 1GB free trial limits, Ontrack EasyRecovery can help you retrieve files from your external hard drive.

The most admirable features that makes this data recovery tool to this list is that, Stellar Data Recovery is able to repair corrupt videos and photos.

So, if your video is blurry, choppy, grainy, flickering, stuttering, unplayable, and out-of-sync, try this tool to repair videos shot with cameras of Canon, Sony, Go Pro, Nikon, etc. And of course, it's only supported in premium version with a relative high price.

But for the trial edition with up to 1GB free, If you can tolerant the tricky custom installation path, you definitely can take a shot on Stellar Data Recovery on your Windows PC, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and other desktops and mobile devices to recover files.

This barely means that all your lost photos, videos, documents, and many other types of data are very likely to be restored. Our statistics shows an average 99% success recovery.

When hard drive is formatted, files are deleted, file system are corrupted, Computer is crashed, and other software issues, this data recovery tool will be a great assistance.

However, if the lost files on your external hard drive is relatively large (for example, 2TB), Disk Drill won't satisfy your needs as it only provides a free recovery of 500 MB.