Hetman Partition Recovery

Maker: Hetman Software Platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux

Hetman Partition Recovery covers a much broader technical range than a typical consumer partition-recovery tool: current versions reach across Windows, macOS and Linux file systems, encrypted volumes, virtual-disk and forensic image formats, and specialized storage such as VMware datastores and DVR/NVR recording systems.

What Hetman Partition Recovery actually does

The tool targets deleted or damaged partitions and RAW/unrecognized drives — the everyday-user-error and file-system-damage scenarios covered elsewhere on this site — through a wizard-driven interface rather than a technical, command-line one. Every license runs the same recovery engine; what changes between tiers is who's allowed to use it and on what kind of source, covered under Editions below.

Read-only source analysis

Hetman states that storage is analyzed read-only during scanning. Read-only scanning reduces the risk of the recovery software itself modifying the source, but it does not make repeated scanning of a physically unstable drive harmless — a drive that's failing mechanically or electronically still needs an imaging or lab workflow first. See Recovery Copies for that step.

Metadata-aware vs. content-aware recovery

When filesystem metadata survives, Partition Recovery can preserve names, paths and fragmentation maps for recovered files. When metadata is insufficient or too damaged to trust, content-aware/signature recovery can still find supported file formats, but namespace information — original names and folder structure — may be lost in that fallback mode. That's the same tradeoff described in File-System Recovery vs. File Carving, applied inside a single consumer tool rather than across two separate ones.

File-system and storage support

Per Hetman's published technical specifications, supported file systems include NTFS and ReFS and FAT/exFAT on Windows; APFS and HFS+ on macOS; Ext2/Ext3/Ext4, XFS, ReiserFS, Btrfs, ZFS and UFS on Linux/Unix; and the specialized VMFS5/VMFS6 (VMware ESXi datastores) and HikvisionFS (DVR/NVR recording systems) formats. That specialized-format coverage is broader than most consumer-tier competitors on this page offer.

Disk images and virtual disks

Recognized virtual-disk and image formats include VMDK (VMware), VHD/VHDX and AVHD/AVHDX snapshots (Hyper-V), VDI (VirtualBox), QCOW/QCOW2/QED/RAW/IMG (KVM/QEMU/Proxmox), HDD/HDS (Parallels), plain RAW/IMG/ISO images, Apple DMG/CDR/SparseImage/SparseBundle, and the forensic EnCase/EWF and AFF/AFF4 formats. Being able to open a forensic-image format doesn't make a consumer scan-and-recover tool a forensic acquisition platform on its own, but it does mean images captured elsewhere — including from a lab's own imaging hardware — can be scanned directly rather than needing conversion first.

Encryption

Current versions support BitLocker, LUKS, VeraCrypt, Apple FileVault and encrypted APFS volumes, plus file-level Windows EFS and Linux fscrypt. This is native unlock support with a valid password, recovery key or key file — it opens a volume you already have valid credentials for. It does not crack an unknown password or bypass encryption on a volume you can't otherwise access.

Checked August 2026: Hetman's purchase pages calculate current pricing dynamically by product, license tier, region and active discount. The license terms below are confirmed directly from the vendor; for the current price, use the link on each card.

Home version

Consumer

Personal, non-commercial use only. Covers the everyday-user scenarios this site catalogs — deleted or damaged partitions, RAW drives.

UsePersonal, non-commercial only
Computers1 (a virtual machine counts as a separate computer)
RestrictionCannot recover from virtual-machine, Apple, or forensic disk images

See siteSee current dynamic price

View on hetmanrecovery.com →

Office version

Prosumer

For internal business and IT use — not for recovering other people's drives as a paid service. Adds the ability to recover from virtual-machine, Apple, and forensic disk images.

UseInternal business / workplace use
Computers1
AddsRecovery from VM, Apple, and forensic disk images

See siteUpgradeable from Home for the price difference

View on hetmanrecovery.com →

Business version

Professional

The only edition Hetman explicitly licenses for providing data recovery services to third parties — the tier a paid recovery business is supposed to be running on.

UseCommercial — recovering data for clients explicitly permitted
Computers1

See siteAn Unlimited License (all products, unlimited computers within one company) is also offered

View on hetmanrecovery.com →

The distinction that matters

If a business is being built around recovering other people's data, only the Business version's license actually permits that — Home and Office are both restricted to personal or internal use. This is the same pattern seen with R-Studio's editions.

Important limitations

Encryption support in Partition Recovery unlocks volumes you already hold valid credentials for — a password, recovery key or key file — and doesn't crack an unknown one. Read-only scanning limits what the software itself can do to the source, but it doesn't change the physical condition of a failing drive, and repeated scan passes on unstable media carry the same risk they would with any other tool. And like most consumer-facing recovery software, the wizard-driven workflow trades away some of the lower-level control and diagnostic visibility that technician-grade tools expose by design.

When to use something else

Partition Recovery is built for a single disk, not an array — if the source is a multi-disk RAID, Windows Storage Spaces volume, or NAS, Hetman RAID Recovery is the sibling product built for that job. And read-only scanning aside, a drive that's failing physically — not just logically damaged — still belongs in an imaging or lab workflow before any recovery software touches it repeatedly.