A camera will suddenly ask for a format to be done, an entire holiday's worth of photos vanish while transferring, a microSD card has broken into two parts: memory cards fail and do so cruelly. Photographers, drone pilots and families across Swansea and the Gower send us their cards, and the pictures come home most of the time.
We provide free diagnostics for each memory card recovery project. All of our memory card projects begin with a single fixed price quote in writing prior to any work commencing.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. This is true of all our services except for failure of electrical/mechanical components, chip level repairs, DVRs and forensic analysis. Our full price list can be seen at the cost of data recovery page.
Each memory card project starts by identifying the fault from the symptoms, and as you can see these fifteen faults cover nearly all the faults that we get at the bench.
Camera, reader and laptop all are unable to recognise the memory card, as the card's controller or firmware has failed.
File table broken, photos OK. If you agree to format the memory card then this is the one way you'll make things worse.
Images are still on the flash card until new images are placed above them, so retire the card and most of them are recoverable.
Camera formatting is a quick format; the previous shoot will typically be preserved underneath it.
Cards tend to break at their slot or adapter; if the tracks of the monolith survive then a direct probe will read them.
A 128GB card that says 30MB has essentially failed into its controller's default state, which means chip-level work.
When a controller is dying it puts itself in read-only mode; a slid SD lock switch can also create the same issue as this.
Cards from a washing machine or a car door, cleaned, repaired and then read at chip level.
Fake cards loop writes over themselves as soon as you fill the tiny flash memory on the actual card. What was genuinely written there is still recoverable.
Removing a card while it is being copied will destroy the file table, but the images can be carved back from a raw dump.
If a dashcam uses a card to record video in loops for years and it eventually wears out mid-loop, the footage can still be carved from the blocks that remain intact.
Ultra and Extreme SanDisk cards are prone to having their controllers fail while the NAND underneath stays healthy. This is more common than any of the other failure patterns we log.
A microSD card is just a single piece of silicon. It has no removable chips. The only way to recover anything from a failed card like this is to map the pinouts and probe it directly.
Pro-body cards crash hard when pushed to 4K bitrates, and their PCIe internal connections are managed on the NVMe side of the bench.
Those cards arrive bent and cracked as well as being partially written before the crash, making it a combination of physical damage along with logical corruption due to the fact that the cards were still writing data out during the crash.
Memory cards have no armour. They are made up of a NAND wafer and controller in plastic packaging used for years at a time in cameras, dashcams, drones and consoles. SD and SDHC, SDXC and microSD, CompactFlash plus the newer XQD and CFexpress formats all pass through here; however there is always one first step which remains the same: a complete forensic image of the card to provide each later process with a copy, so the original card is never put at further risk.
Recovery at the chip-level is initiated when a card can't be read because of a snap or has been damaged from an electrical failure. At this point recovery will involve reading the memory directly. Photos and video clips are then taken out of the raw dump and woven together again. Since microSD cards are monoliths, a single piece of silicon with all layers sealed together, it's the most difficult type of flash job. Whether the internal tracks were intact after the break is what determines if the recovery will be successful. This is determined prior to spending any money by our free diagnostic.
Recovery of media from a card is an extremely delicate form of micro-surgery on flash memory, using exactly the same bench used for sticks and monoliths:
Communicates directly with raw NAND within your stick or card and rebuilds the dead controller's logic within software. This is how a stick or card that has died completely gives up its contents.
Our chip-off station uses controlled hot air and IR rework to lift memory chips from failed boards, all while keeping to the temperatures the data contained within the memory can tolerate.
Fine pitch probe adapters now allow us to access the memory of those one piece cards and sticks with no chip to remove (and we're adding new pinouts to our library all the time).
The XOR patterns, ECC and wear levelling are reconstructed in software, so a raw dump will be recognisable as your folders and files again.
Damaged connectors or broken traces can be repaired under magnification, which is often the entire repair needed for physical damage.
Cards and sticks are imaged through blocked reader ports, which do not alter the original flash memory on the card or stick from the time of delivery to return.
SD to CFexpress, dashcam to drone to wedding camera: the SanDisk Ultra and Extreme families dominate the tray; the classic failure of both is a dead or read-only controller with perfectly good NAND. The other type of corruption we see regularly occurs when counterfeit 'high-capacity' microSD cards from marketplace sellers corrupt as soon as writes wrap around the real flash inside.
First get a quote over the telephone or use our free on-line diagnostic. The majority of customers then have their media sent to us via post, this is tracked and insured.
Do you want to send a drive from your computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please do not send the complete unit of computer or device with a hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD) inside. Please remove it and only send the drive itself. For a server, please remove all disks and label them by their bay. We will also not perform removal of internal drives from devices in order to access data. Also, we will not extract data from devices where storage is soldered onto the motherboard (such as T2 and Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops). Additionally, we do not recover data from phones and tablets, only drives that can be removed and sent to us. If you're not sure which kind you have, ring us first.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Clearly mark the parcel with the name Bristol Data Recovery, and when your media has been diagnosed we will call you immediately.
If unsure about what to post, please call us first on 0800 689 0668 (the free phone number), or complete a free online diagnostic.
Diagnostic provided at no charge. Fixed quote. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start now or call the freephone.