EaseUS does a "Quick Scan" producing a file count and data count of "Deleted Files" and an "Advanced Scan" giving the file/data counts for "Lost Files" and "Existing Files". The discovered data can be filtered to search for particular files, and users may preview files before recovering.[12] The free version searches for and identifies recoverable data but does not recover any files until a license is purchased.[12]
Recover from boot media
Paid only
Bootable media can be created, with a USB drive or external drive, to recover data without having to boot the operating system.[3]
Forensic sound recovery
Yes
Data is recovered in a forensically sound manner.[5]
On most filesystems, file deletion typically does not erase the data itself but simply flags the file as having been deleted, and marks the physical space the file took up on the hard drive as empty, allowing other files to overwrite the deleted file.[3] Consequently, file recovery software like EaseUS can, under some circumstances, recover deleted files from unallocated drive space. For example, Al-Sabaawi et. al. (2019) showed that EaseUS can carve files from the LOST.DIR on an Android operating system.[7] This is, in part, because the files' data resides on the drive as fragments.
EaseUS scans drives for deleted files in two different ways: (1) file directory and (2) storage content. The file directory method retrieves information about the deleted file from the filesystem.[3] Typically, NTFS keeps a record of files, even those that have been deleted and this information is used to recover a (deleted) file. The storage content method performs file carving to look for patterns in unallocated sectors in the hope that a continuous run of sectors will match a pattern. The latter method can recover files but it does not recover the file system metadata associated with the file, such as the file name, modification date or directory structure.[13][14][15] More importantly, the second method is less effective if the files on the drive were fragmented prior to deletion or are simply plaintext.[15]
EaseUS recovery of formatted partitions uses a different method from above. Instead of using file carving, the software likely reads from the backup volume boot record to obtain the lost partition information.[15] A successful restore of the formatted partition also restores the associated metadata and file directory structure. Partition recovery is not certain. For example, an experiment by Nordvik et. al. (2020)[15] did not successfully recover an ext4 partition that was reformatted with the NTFS filesystem but were able to recover an NTFS partition reformatted with the ext4 filesystem.