Ontrack EasyRecovery vs TestDisk

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.

TestDisk is free, open-source software for recovering lost partitions and helping disks boot again when faulty software or human error causes the problem. It can repair partition tables, recover deleted partitions, rebuild or restore FAT and NTFS boot sectors, fix FAT tables, and repair an MFT using its mirror. For file recovery, it can undelete files from FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext2, or copy files from deleted FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext2/ext3/ext4 partitions. Listed partition-recovery formats also include APFS, HFS+, XFS and ZFS. It works with hard drives, USB drives, memory cards, disk images, DAS, SAN and Linux RAID devices. The portable application is used by extracting its files; no installer is required. Listed operating systems include Windows, macOS, Linux, DOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and SunOS. TestDisk is licensed under GNU GPL v2 or later. The maker says it does not connect to the internet or send information about the user, computer or data. The download page lists version 7.2 dated February 22, 2024, and 7.3-WIP as beta.