iTop Data Recovery – Honest Review

It happens even with the best of us that sometimes we delete a file accidentally. It’s not a huge issue if it’s a less important file or you are able to recreate it easily, but if the file was critical and there is no backup, suddenly you are scrambling for a solution. The best course of action to take in these situations is to turn to a data recovery tool. In this article, I’m going to review one such tool called iTop Data Recovery, which claims to be a “one stop solution for any data loss.” Let’s see how it performs.

Requirements

iTop Data Recovery is currently available for Windows 11, 10, 8, and 7. In this review, I’m going to test the Pro version on a Windows 10 machine.

The app has no other significant system requirements that a modern PC would not meet.

Installation

Since we are talking about a data recovery tool that needs to scan the computer to do its job, it’s not a surprise that it comes as an installed application and not a cloud service. Downloading the installer is as easy as it gets. I just opened iTop’s website and clicked the big Download Now button, and the file download started immediately. No sign-up required, no forms to fill – a positive experience so far.

Note: A clear benefit of using an offline data recovery tool like iTop Data Recovery is that everything happens on the local machine. I don’t need to worry about confidential information or private photos being uploaded to some cloud storage location. I am in full control over the data during the recovery process. Keep this in mind. Even if you find an alternative, cloud-based data recovery option, make sure to consider your need for data security and privacy.

Next, I started the installation process. It’s a straightforward setup wizard. I accepted the License Agreement, selected the installation location, and asked for a desktop icon to be created.

Once ready, the installer gave me the option to launch iTop Data Recovery so I could start restoring files right away.

Using iTop Data Recovery

In order to test the capabilities of iTop Data Recovery, I created a test scenario with a USB stick. I prepared three different files to see how recovery works for different file types. The tests look at recovering a text document, an image file, and a PDF.

Here are the test files on the USB. 

The next step was to imitate an accident. I selected all three files, hit the Delete button, and confirmed that yes, I’m sure that I want to permanently delete these files. With that, it was done; the files were supposedly unretrievable.

Now, iTop Data Recovery claims that they can restore these “permanently deleted” files with an up to 95% recovery rate. 

It’s important to understand that the success of recovery depends on multiple factors, and not all of them are under the control of recovery tools. The most important factor is how much write operation happened on the drive after the file was deleted from it. The more someone uses the drive, the higher the likelihood that the storage location of the deleted file gets overwritten with fresh data, making a recovery impossible. 

Tip: Make sure to stop using the drive when you accidentally delete an important file from it and immediately start the recovery process. That’s how you can maximize the chance of successful data recovery.

Now that we are up to speed on basic data recovery best practices, let’s get back to iTop Data Recovery and see how well it could recover the three test files.

The user interface of the application is clean and intuitive.

On the left-hand side, I could select the Scan Locations. This is especially useful because if someone knows the specific folder where the files were deleted from, it’s enough to only scan that folder instead of the entire hard drive, which would take a lot longer. Saving time is always a great benefit.

It’s possible to scan HDD, SSD, external USB stick, or even the Recycle Bin.

Since I knew that the files were missing from the USB drive (letter F in my case), I only selected that one as the scan location.

On the right side, I could select the File Types that the scan should look for. I could choose between Photos, Videos, Music, Documents, Archives, and Others. 

Note: iTop claims that their tool can recover data from more than 1,000 formats. The list of supported common formats is available on their website.

Because I was testing the recovery of multiple different file types, I left all file types selected.

And that’s really all I had to configure. After that, it was time to hit the big Scan button in the middle of the window.

As you can see in the image above, a progress bar shows the status of the scan. In my case, the entire scan took only a few seconds. However, keep in mind that on larger drives with a lot of files, the process might take a bit longer. 

Once the scan was completed, a new window appeared with a list of the deleted files that were found.

iTop Data Recovery was able to find all three test files, and it correctly identified one of them as a photo and two as documents. I could also see that the estimated Recoverability is “Excellent,” which is not a surprise because I didn’t use the USB after deleting the files.

It’s also worth highlighting the neat preview function. When I hovered over one of the eye icons on the right, I could see a pop-up preview of the deleted file. 

Next, I tried to recover the files.

I selected all three deleted files for recovery and then pressed the Recover button in the bottom right. A new window opened up, where I had to choose a folder to restore the files to.

When I tried to recover to the USB drive, I got a warning message stating that recovering to the original drive might overwrite the original data and reduce the chance of a successful recovery. For this reason, it’s always a good practice to recover files to a different drive.

I changed the recovery location to the Desktop and started the recovery process.

iTop Data Recovery managed to restore all three files successfully. I could open them, make changes, and save them again without any issue. The only thing I had to fix was the file names because those were not recovered with 100% accuracy. That’s a small price to pay for a recovery that could have saved me from many hours of work recreating a business-critical document.

Pros

• Easy to install
• Simple and intuitive user interface
• Precise scan location selection
• All common file formats are supported
• Quick scan and recovery times
• Multiple language support

Cons

• Only available for Windows systems
• Need to upgrade to a paid version to access all capabilities

Conclusion

iTop Data Recovery is a capable and easy to use recovery solution that simply does its job. It’s a pleasant surprise to use a tool that’s not overcomplicated and has no additional bloat that tries to force useless features on the user. This application makes data recovery quick and painless. I recommend keeping it in your IT toolbelt.

Giveaway: Free upgrade to the Pro version for 3 months

iTop was kind enough to create a unique giveaway license for Troubleshooting Central readers. You can upgrade iTop Data Recovery to the Pro version for 3 months completely free of charge, using the key below. No account creation is required.

License key: CA63E-22277-D3817-22D43

There are only a limited number of giveaway keys, so grab them while available!