In this review we are going take a look at Stellar Phoenix Outlook PST Repair (a mouth full). PST is a file that Outlook creates and where it saves all your data into. One of your worst nightmares is of course losing all your contacts and mails. In this review we will therefore see if Stellar Phoenix PST Repair is any good at its job and see if we can get our simulated damage data back!
Let’s get started with this premium recovery tool for recovering PST files on Windows. We also would like to say that the freeware version can also open your damaged PST file and analyse it, so you can test it even before you buy it.
Features
Stellar Phoenix Outlook PST Repair includes many features and most of them are really good. You are able to open your mails, calendars, contacts, tasks, notes and journals once you’re done recovering your PST file.
The recovery process itself is quite easy all you have to do is select your PST file in Stellar Phoenix Outlook PST Repair and click on the big Scan Now button and the program will start the process. If you don’t know where the PST file is saved on your computer then the tool has a “find outlook file” feature included which search your entire hard disk for any PST file and shows you the results. Quite handy for non-technicians who don’t know where Microsoft Outlook saves it’s data file.
To test the tool we used a 195MB PST file on our system and corrupted it. We ran a scan and it only took around 3 seconds for the tool to find the lost mails!
The program was also able to fully recovery my contacts and calendar, however there were some things missing but that is to be expected. Something is corrupted and some data Is lost forever. So a 100% recovery is in most situations technically impossible.
With a PST file of 3.75 GB it took 9 minutes to scan it, 4 minutes to repair it and 8 minutes to save it again. So in theory you could have 3.75 GB worth of mails (which is a lot) recovered in less than 21 minutes. That’s an impressive result!
You can also export single emails to MSG (Email File), EML, RTF (Text File), HTML (Web Page) and PDF which makes it possible to not having to restore your entire PST file but only a couple of mails you need, which is a very good feature in this tool!
The feature set of Stellar Phoenix Outlook PST Repair is quite impressive. It includes everything you would need to recover your PST file and nothing else. Simply because it’s not needed it only includes what you need. I was impressed with the level of recovery it was able to achieve on a damaged PST file. It does however not support OST files to be recovered which I do miss a bit. Therefore I would score the feature a 8.5 out of 10.
Design
Stellar Phoenix outlook PST Repair looks a bit like the Office 2007 suite. The design is clearly inspired on it and it does give the user a bit more familiar feeling with the program. However if they want to improve even further then it might be a good idea to let the program start with the 2010 style by default since this one does looks the closest to current Office Applications.
While the design is not bad we do think there is room for improvement. Useless tabs with only one option could be removed (for example the Update Wizard under tools could be moved under Help where it’s located in most programs). And we really believe it would be an improvement to start in 2010 style if you want to mimic Outlook as best as you can. Therefor we score the design a 7.5 out of 10. It could use some improvement but it’s not bad, its pretty good.
Ease of use
When discussing the ease of use of these sort of programs it’s important to remember that they will always be a bit more technical than most programs due to their job; restoring corrupted data. However with this tool Stellar tried and in my eyes succeeded in making an easy to use recovery tool for PST files. Most features are explained quite good and with the search function for PST files I mentioned before it is quite easy to use.
However the search feature did fail to find the PST file on my pc, so they could better have used the registry entries for the locations of the PST files.
However I do believe that everyone who can use Outlook is more than capable of using this program. Therefor I would score Stellar Outlook PST Repair a 9 out of 10 on Ease of Use.
Verdict
Overall we were quite impressed with the power of this tool, however we did find that there is room for improvement on the design part of the program as explained in the design section and there were some features that could use some improvement.
However we did love the program and it showed great results so in the end it’s a good program. I even want to go as far as saying it’s a perfect program if you need to recover your pst files. The improvements suggested do not impact the overall results of the program which are more important.