Top 5 best image recovery software of 2020

1. Recuva (free and paid)

Recuva is a data recovery software that is quite familiar to many people, the free version fully supports all the basic functions, such as data scanning, preview and recovery. If you want to use the premium features, you need to upgrade to the paid version for $ 19.95 / year for one device.

According to the test, Recuva can recover all 10 photos when they are deleted, however, the software cannot recover the data if the hard drive, memory card, USB… has been formatted.

2. Recoverit Photo Recovery (paid)

This is a software from the manufacturer Wondershare, Recoverit Photo Recovery has a simple interface and supports a lot of features, however, the software is sold for up to 60 USD / year.

However, Recoverit can recover all photos even if the user has pressed Shift + Delete or formatted the drive.

3. PhotoRec (Free)

PhotoRec is a free and open source application that comes with the installation package with up to two executables (the graphical version and the command line interface).

The version has a graphical interface that makes selecting the drive more complicated because the partition name is not displayed, you have to open Disk Management Utility to search and choose the file format to recover. However, PhotoRec can recover all deleted or formatted files.

4. Puran File Recovery (Free)

Puran File Recovery is a free utility that helps to recover many different data formats. The software has a simple interface, but not very nice but easy to use and works well.

If quick scan mode cannot find deleted data, simply switch to deep scan mode (takes a long time but recover a lot of data).

5. Exif Untrasher (Free)

Exif Untrasher is free software exclusively for macOS users. True to its name, the software was developed to recover images from memory cards, however Exif Untrasher only supports JPEG format, doesn't support RAW, PNG, TIFF or anything else.

Most macOS data recovery apps cost money, while Exif Untrasher is free. If you are using a low capacity memory card this would be a viable option.

To limit the loss of data, images on a USB, memory card or hard drive, users should backup all data to the cloud. There are many storage services to choose from, such as Dropbox, Google Drive or iCloud.

It is convenient to have many free image recovery software available, however, if you regularly back up your data to the cloud, you will avoid the common risks and reduce data recovery time.

Lesley Montoya

Update 03 December 2020