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Looking for the best data recovery software? Remo Recover, from Remo Software, is an option for both Windows and Mac users. It includes deep hard drive scanning and can recover files even from formatted drives or deleted partitions. But, at least on Windows, we had significant issues with the user interface rendering improperly.

So, is this file recovery tool worth the money? Let’s dive into our Remo Recover review to find out.

Remo Recover: Plans and pricing

You can download and run Remo Recover for free. But, if you want to actually recover detected files, you’ll need a license. Pricing differs for Windows and Mac users.

Windows users can choose between the Media Edition for $49.97 per computer or the Pro Edition for $79.97 per computer. If you want to recover data from formatted drives or deleted partitions, you’ll need the Pro Edition.

Mac users have three options: Basic, Media, and Pro. Basic costs $49.97 and essentially only enables quick scanning. The Media edition, for $69.97, enables you to run a deep scan. The Pro edition, for $179.97, unlocks formatted drive and deleted partition recovery. 

Remo Recover: Features

Remo Recover is designed to work with a wide variety of file types and file systems. It covers NTFS, FAT, HFS, and exFAT file systems, which means the software can recognize partitions regardless of whether you’re running Windows or Mac-formatted drives. In addition, the software can scan external drives, including SD cards and USB flash drives.

The software runs both quick scans and deep scans, which helps to ensure that you’re able to get files that were deleted several months ago by scraping your hard disk’s surface. You can organize your file search by file type or keywords. Notably, while Remo Recover has a built-in preview function, it didn’t work for previewing Word (*.docx), Excel (*.xlsx), or PDF (*.pdf) files when we tried it out. It did, however, open JPG images.

Remo Recover: Client and client setup

The Remo Recover client was difficult to use. The software is designed so that, at least on Windows, the text doesn’t fit inside the window. We tried adjusting the size of the window and changing screen resolution settings, and neither seemed to help. 

Worse, this poor rendering was consistent across computers and, based on past reviews, has been an issue with Remo Recover that’s gone unaddressed for several years now. Overall, this issue made it hard to figure out how to recover deleted files using the software.

We also weren’t thrilled with the way Remo Recover presents recovered files. All of the detected files are organized into folders, meaning you need to know where the deleted files you’re looking for were originally located. While the interface calculates a file size for individual files, there’s no way to tell how large any of the folders are since they present as being 0 KB in size.

Remo Recover: Performance

We tested out Remo Recover’s performance by scanning a 1TB internal hard drive. Running a quick scan took less than 10 seconds. However, it’s hard to tell how many files this actually turned up, since there’s no way to display them in a single list. Scanning through the folders, though, it seemed that there were only a few hundred files, when other recovery software had found thousands on the same drive. But some of the recovered files had been deleted several months ago, which was promising.

We followed this up with a deep scan, which took around 50 minutes. This turned up more files that were several months old. It’s worth noting that Remo Recover doesn’t provide any information about the recoverability of these files, and the preview function didn’t work on most of them. That said, several Word documents and images that we recovered could be opened and didn’t appear obviously damaged.

Remo Recover: Efficiency

Remo Recover appears to have a few built-in features for efficiency, but they’re rendered useless by the issues with the software interface. For example, when running a deep scan, it’s possible to make out a progress bar, but not to read the estimated time remaining. 

We could see, however, that the software used up about 10% of CPU resources and 200MB of memory while running a deep scan. That’s in line with other comparable file recovery tools we’ve tested.

Remo Recover: Support

Remo Software offers support by live web chat and email 24/7 and over the phone from 7 AM to 5 PM Pacific Time, Monday to Friday. You can also check out the online knowledge base, although the questions answered there are more about software limitations than about technical issues. More helpful is the support blog, where you’ll find an archive of articles detailing how to deal with specific recovery situations using Remo Recover.

Remo Recover: Final verdict

Until Remo Recover deals with the client display issues, we simply can’t recommend this software. It’s difficult to use without being able to see the options clearly, and features like the file preview function don’t seem to work, even for documents and images. Moreover, while we appreciate that the deep scan was able to recover months-old files, waiting nearly an hour with no idea how much time the scan would take tried our patience.

Remo Recover: The competition

For what you would pay for Remo Recover, there are several better hard drive data recovery options available. EaseUS is one of our favorites, since it enables you to recover data from lost partitions and formatted drives. It’s a little more expensive, with one-month subscriptions selling for $69.95, but the well-designed interface is a welcome relief after trying Remo Recover.

If you’re looking for a cheaper alternative, Auslogics File Recovery costs just $25.46 per year. This software only works for Windows, and the scans aren’t as effective as we’d like, but it can scan multiple drives simultaneously and runs very quickly. 

To discover other alternatives to Remo Recover, read our guide to the Best data recovery software.