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Recovery Explorer is SysDev Laboratories' three-edition line for users who need more control than Raise Data Recovery provides without moving directly to the UFS Explorer product family. Standard covers common single-disk cases, RAID is a genuine array-reconstruction product in its own right rather than a minor add-on, and Professional extends the toolkit to complex RAID, encryption and specialized storage technologies — including, contrary to this page's own earlier text, a working hex editor.

Standard: single-disk recovery, deliberately no RAID

Standard covers FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ReFS on Windows; HFS+ and APFS on Mac; and Ext2/3/4, UFS, XFS, ReiserFS, JFS and Btrfs on Linux/Unix. It reads disk images and virtual disks in VMDK, VHD, VHDX, QCOW, VDI, Parallels, DMG and SparseBundle formats, plus the vendor's own RDR format. It includes lost-partition detection, IntelliRAW content-based recovery for when filesystem structures are too damaged to trust directly, scan pause/resume for long jobs, and file preview before recovery. What it deliberately does not do is RAID reconstruction of any kind — that boundary is the actual reason RAID and Professional exist as separate, higher-priced editions.

RAID: a real reconstruction product, not an add-on card

The RAID edition covers standard RAID 0, 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6, plus nested/hybrid levels RAID 10, 50, 60 and 50E. Its specialized-storage support runs further than that: Btrfs-RAID, Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR), and OpenBSD softraid, alongside vendor-specific NAS layouts from Synology, QNAP, WD My Cloud, Asustor, TerraMaster and Buffalo. It also handles composite volume systems that aren't RAID in the traditional sense — Windows Dynamic Disks and Storage Spaces, Apple APFS Fusion Drive, Linux LVM, mdadm software RAID, and Intel Matrix RAID — plus custom layouts defined manually through the vendor's own RAID Definition Language (RDL) when automatic assembly isn't enough. That's a genuinely broad reconstruction toolkit, both automatic and manual, for the price point.

Professional: encryption, ZFS/VMFS/F2FS, and the hex editor

Professional adds ZFS RAID-Z and Oracle/SUN/FreeNAS ZFS pool support, VMware ESX(i) VMFS and VMFS6, the F2FS flash filesystem, and dedicated Drobo BeyondRAID processing. Its encryption support covers Windows BitLocker, Apple FileVault 2 and encrypted APFS volumes, LUKS, TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt, eCryptfs-encrypted folders, encrypted VMware VMDK virtual disks, full-volume encryption on Synology/QNAP/Asustor NAS units, and password-based encryption on OpenBSD softraid — native unlock with a valid password or key in every case, not password cracking. It can also nest virtual disks, reaching into a virtual machine or a multi-layered disk image without extracting each intermediate layer first, and its low-level toolkit includes a genuine hexadecimal viewer and editor, data-allocation tracing through reverse address translation, and parity-calculation and field-highlighting utilities for manual analysis. The earlier version of this page's claim that Professional lacks a hex editor was incorrect and has been removed.

Trial limits

Per SysDev Laboratories' own product pages, both the RAID and Professional trial versions cap recovered file copies at 768 KB per file — enough to confirm a scan finds the right data, not enough to actually recover anything of normal size. Professional's trial additionally disables save/copy from the hex-viewer dialogs. Standard's trial follows the same evaluate-before-you-buy model; check the current product page for its exact figure before relying on it for a specific file size.

Important limitations

Encryption support across the line unlocks storage you already have valid credentials for; none of it is a password-cracking tool. RAID reconstruction is only available on the RAID and Professional editions — Standard's boundary there is deliberate, not a bug. And despite the depth of its RAID and encryption support, Recovery Explorer still sits a tier below UFS Explorer Professional on forensic image-format coverage, which matters specifically for evidentiary or chain-of-custody workflows rather than ordinary recovery cases.

Prices verified August 2026 directly from the vendor's own site, in USD. Software pricing changes without notice — treat the figures below as a starting point and confirm the current price on the official site before buying.