Ontrack EasyRecovery vs PhotoRec

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.

PhotoRec is a free file recovery program for retrieving lost videos, documents, archives, and pictures from storage media and disk images. It searches the underlying data instead of relying on the file system, which can help after file-system damage or reformatting. It recognizes more than 480 file extensions across about 300 file families, and listed file systems include FAT, NTFS, exFAT, ext2/ext3/ext4, and HFS+.

Supported sources include hard disks, CD-ROMs, memory cards, USB drives, raw disk images, and EnCase E01 images. PhotoRec runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, DOS, several BSD systems, Solaris, and other Unix systems. It accesses the recovery drive or card in read-only mode; recovered files should go to a different partition. The portable download runs after extracting its archive, without an installer. QPhotoRec provides a graphical interface, while PhotoRec can also run from scripts or batch files with command-line options. The maker says it usually cannot recover original filenames and does not work well with ReiserFS.