Stellar Phoenix Word Recovery - Simple, but Slow

Quite often, we regret hitting the delete button on that important document. Some other times, these word files get corrupted because of a hard drive crash or because you unplugged the USB flash drive in a hurry. In all such cases, a file recovery software can be pretty handy. Stellar has launched their own software called Stellar Phoenix Word Recovery, which is a document recovery software.

Interface and Features
Word Recovery is a small software and consumes only about 3.5 MB of disk space. Installing it is a breeze and once done, all you have to do is activate it. Running the software is quite simple, so much so that first time users will easily get a hang of it in a few minutes. For that matter, those who haven’t used any recovery tools at all will also find using Word Recovery quite easy.

Recurring error makes users go for Advanced Repair

This application’s primary task is to recover corrupted DOC and DOCX files. It does this by searching the disk or folder for all document file types. We liked the fact that the company has made a list of things that you need to perform to recover the data.

Word Recovery has three panes. The one on the left lists all the files and folders in a tree list format. The larger pane on the right usually displays the steps on how to recover a Word document, but it can also double up as a preview window where the contents of a document can be previewed without saving the repaired file. Finally, the pane below these two shows all the activities that are being performed.

The standard toolbar present on most Windows applications is present. The features available  are - Start Repair, Start Advanced Repair, Stop Repair, Add File, Remove File from Tree.

Performance
In order to try out the software, we messed around with a few Word documents. The software works pretty well but we found a few issues with it. Firstly, the simple repair rarely works. You’ll have to use the Advanced Repair option most of the times, which is a little slower compared to the Simple Repair option. Another issue was that since some of these commands would execute pretty slowly, we thought of manually restarting the application. Not only does it take too long to respond, on a couple of occasions we had to forcefully shut down the application using the Task Manager.

Stop Repair takes too long

The software searches for Microsoft Word compatible documents in the drives, but it can’t be used to recover deleted data. A few files we made and deleted instantly could not be found at all. We also tried to run Microsoft Word simultaneously alongside the software and we saw some erratic behavior.

Easy to use interface, good software for office use

Verdict
Stellar Phoenix Word Recovery is priced at Rs. 1,650 which we feel is a little steep for a home end user, who won’t need to use it very often. However, it’s a very good solution for a data recovery centre. There are quite a few applications that can recover deleted document files but few which can correctly restore corrupted documents. The software has a free download as well, but that's just a demo version that will only let you preview repaired documents but not save them.