Stellar has been around for decades now, offering utilities for individuals and businesses, all centered around data recovery and repair. If you just need to get back deleted or seemingly lost files, then Stellar Data Recovery for Windows is a good place to start. 

It boasts an impressive range of file types that can be recovered (over 200) and this can be done from hard drives, SSDs, USB drives, SD cards, Micro-SD cards and other variants. It’s also happy to deal with various formatting options, including NTFS, FAT32, FAT16 or exFAT. So it should be suitable for most people’s PCs or storage media. 

The user interface is nice and simple. When you first launch the program you can select the types of file you want to recover, then the folders and drives on which the software will search. It’s all via options you can click on, so even if you’re not familiar with this kind of software you’ll be up and running in no time. 

You’ll need to use the Deep Scan feature to hunt down deleted files, and this can take quite a while if you have a large drive to interrogate. Thankfully, the software will happily get on with things by itself, so you can leave it running while you get on with other tasks. 

Once it has completed the scan, you can then select the files you want to recover, then if all goes well they should be restored to your drive. 

Stellar Data Recovery for Windows can also retrieve information from encrypted drives that use BitLocker, although you’ll need the password to enable the recovery. Depending on which tier you select, there’s also options to recover corrupted image and video files, plus rescue data from lost drive partitions. 

There’s a free demo version to get you started, but it only lets you search for the missing files and preview their content. This at least lets you see if the missing files might be recoverable before you spend any money.

To use the software fully, and gain access to the advanced recovery features, you’ll need to sign up to one of the three tiers. These include Standard, which costs $59.99/£49.99, Professional (adds lost partitions and unbootable system recovery) that is currently $89.99/£94.99 or the Premium tier that has all the features of the others plus repairing corrupted files and costs $99.99/£99.  

There’s also a version available for macOS, so your Apple using friends can also get their valuable data back.