Question 1

Is Stellar Photo Recovery actually bad?

Accepted Answer

No — Stellar is a competent generic recovery tool with a 20-year track record. It works on photos, documents, RAID arrays, mailbox recovery, and a hundred other things. The issue is that drone footage is a niche they don't optimize for. Their carving engine doesn't preserve XMP sidecar files, doesn't re-pair telemetry to clips, and on H.265 10-bit D-Log M sometimes flattens color depth. For non-drone use cases Stellar is fine. For drone footage there's a better-fit tool at 1/8 the price.

Question 2

Stellar costs $79-99 per year — does that buy ongoing recovery quality?

Accepted Answer

It buys software updates and renewed activation. The recovery engine itself doesn't materially improve year-over-year. We've benchmarked Stellar 11 (2024) against Stellar 12 (2025) on the same 200-clip drone test corpus — recovery rates were within 1.2 percentage points. AerialRestore is a one-time $12.99 with lifetime updates.

Question 3

Can Stellar recover ProRes from a Mavic 3 Cine CFexpress card?

Accepted Answer

Yes, Stellar Premium can carve ProRes 422 HQ from CFexpress. It works. The differences are speed (Stellar takes 2-3x longer on large CFexpress cards in our tests), and that Stellar doesn't re-pair the .SRT and .XMP sidecar files that DJI writes alongside each clip — those contain GPS, altitude, gimbal angle, and exposure data that pilots often need.

Question 4

What about Stellar's video repair feature for corrupted MP4?

Accepted Answer

Stellar Repair for Video is a separate paid module ($69.99) that fixes broken MP4/MOV containers. It's a solid product. AerialRestore includes container repair as part of the $12.99 — moov atom rebuild, fragmented MP4 stitching, H.265 stream re-muxing. For the drone-specific corruption patterns (mid-flight write abort, 'card error' clips), AerialRestore's repair logic was tuned on real DJI failure modes.

Question 5

I already paid for Stellar this year. Should I switch?

Accepted Answer

If Stellar recovered your footage, no — keep using it for the year you paid for. AerialRestore is most useful when (1) Stellar didn't recover everything, (2) you need the GPS/telemetry sidecars re-paired, or (3) you want to stop paying recurring fees. The $12.99 one-time is cheap insurance for the next time.

Question 6

Does AerialRestore really cost $12.99 with no hidden fees?

Accepted Answer

Yes. $12.99 is the entire cost — one-time, lifetime license, all drone codecs included, free updates, free email support. No subscription, no per-recovery fees, no upsells. The free preview lets you confirm your footage is recoverable before paying.

AerialRestore vs Stellar Photo Recovery