Let’s face it, most of us don’t lose data that often, but when you do, it takes time to scurry around and find a tool to attempt recovery. Time is important for finding deleted files. The more often your computer writes to the drive, the less likely you’ll be able to recover data.

Although it’s rare for a hard drive to fail or for an individual to ‘accidentally’ delete important data you need in the future, once it happens, you’ll want software to help you recover, swiftly.

We had a scenario recently where one of our external USB drives started to fail. As no backup was available, the drive decided to write erratically and cause read errors. Before it ceased to work, we needed to shift the data to another drive and recover the lost data.

EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard 12.9.1 is the latest version of the powerful system recovery software, designed to enable you to recover files you’ve deleted accidentally, potentially lost to malware or an entire hard drive partition (although, more on that later, not with the Free version).

What’s new in 12.91? Although a minor version update, you’ll find a host of enhancements. Recovery from FAT drives has been improved, a reduction in the number of scans will now reduce the time required to find and recover files, SSD recovery has been tweaked, whilst there’s now improved support for 4K drives under Windows 10. The UI received a much-needed visual improvement with 12.9, too.

If you only need to recover individual files, EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Free will meet your requirements, enabling you to find and recovery 500MB of data for free, or 2GB if you share your love for the software on social media. This is enough to recover most of your photos from a removable SD card or USB stick.

If you need to recover an entire drive, you’ll need to move up to the Professional edition of EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard, which starts $69.95. It’s worth adding this is a once-only purchase, so you won’t need to pay a subscription fee every year. Buy once, use any time in the future. There is also an option with a WinPE module which you can use to create a bootable recovery option in case you suffer from a full system crash. EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Professional & WinPE is $99.90. A separate Mac version is $89.95 and you cannot use your use one licence between Windows and Mac.

Download EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Free 12.9.1 and, if you are a Mac user, EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac Free 11.10.