Ontrack EasyRecovery vs partrevive

Ontrack EasyRecovery is file recovery software for Windows and macOS. Its Windows version is intended to recover files lost through deletion, reformatting, drive damage, and other common data-loss situations. It supports internal and external drives, SSDs, RAID, USB drives, memory cards, and optical media. Quick Scan searches faster; Deep Scan searches more extensively. The software lists bootable recovery, memory card recovery, RAID recovery, and file previews. Version 15 adds full-screen previews for recoverable videos and previews of files inside ZIP and archive formats. The product page also describes repair for damaged or corrupt photos and videos, with those repair features included in Premium. The Free plan costs nothing and allows up to 1 GB of recovery, with eligible files under 25 MB. Depending on the plan, capabilities include disk imaging, drive cloning, commercial-use licensing, and additional file-system support.

partrevive is a free, MIT-licensed utility for finding and recovering lost or deleted partition tables. It scans disks for filesystem signatures, then checks candidate filesystems through read-only loop devices and mounts to distinguish live data from ghosts. Commands cover scanning, verification, planning, file rescue, table restoration, automatic recovery, undo and disk imaging; a Tkinter interface guides users through scanning, verification, planning and restoration. The project lists NTFS, FAT12/16/32, exFAT, ext2/3/4, btrfs, XFS, F2FS and Linux swap as detected formats. It reports LVM2 and LUKS but does not rebuild them. GPT is the default restore format; MBR is available with `--mbr` and is limited to four primary partitions. Imaging uses ddrescue in two passes with a mapfile, and recovery can use a disk image. Before writing, restore and auto save the current table and check SMART health; restore prompts by default and refuses a mounted target. The single-file Python 3 program requires root and Linux system tools on PATH. The project is described as early, and fragmented or overwritten filesystems may mount incompletely.