A camera that suddenly demands a format, a holiday's worth of photos that vanished mid-transfer, a microSD in two pieces — memory cards fail in cruel ways. Photographers, families and drone pilots across Swansea and the Gower send us their cards, and most of the time the pictures come home.
Free diagnostic on every memory card job. One fixed quote in writing before any work begins.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
Every memory card job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these fifteen cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
Camera, reader and laptop all draw a blank — the card's controller or firmware has died.
The file table broke, not the photos; agreeing to format is the one way to make it worse.
They stay on the flash until new frames land on top — retire the card and most come back.
Camera formats are quick formats; the previous shoot generally survives beneath.
Cards break at slots and adapters; if the monolith's tracks survived, direct probing reads them.
A 128GB card claiming 30MB has failed into its controller's default state — chip-level work.
A dying controller locks itself read-only; a slid SD lock switch mimics the same fault.
Washing machines and car doors — cleaned, repaired and read at chip level.
Fake cards loop writes over themselves once the real (tiny) flash fills; what was genuinely written is recoverable.
Yanking a card mid-copy tears the file table; images are carved back from a raw dump.
Cards written in circles for years wear out mid-loop — footage carved from the surviving blocks.
Ultra and Extreme cards fail with dead controllers over healthy NAND more than any other pattern we log.
One sealed die, no removable chip — recovered only by mapping the pinout and probing directly.
Pro-body cards fail hard at 4K bit-rates; their PCIe internals are handled on the NVMe side of the bench.
Cards from downed drones arrive bent, cracked and mid-write — a compound physical and logical case.
There's no armour on a memory card — a wafer of NAND and a controller sealed in plastic, living in cameras, dashcams, drones and consoles for years at a time. SD and SDHC, SDXC and microSD, CompactFlash, plus the newer XQD and CFexpress formats all come through here, and the first step never changes: a complete forensic image of the card, so every later step works on a copy and the original is never put at further risk.
When a card is snapped or electrically dead the recovery moves to chip level — reading the memory directly and re-weaving the raw dump back into photographs and clips. MicroSDs are monoliths, a single sealed die, and they're the toughest flash jobs there are: whether the internal tracks survived the break decides the outcome. The free diagnostic settles that question before any money changes hands.
Card recovery is microsurgery on flash, using the same bench that handles sticks and monoliths:
Talks straight to raw NAND and rebuilds the dead controller's logic in software — how a lifeless stick or card gives up its contents.
Controlled hot-air and infrared rework lifts memory chips off failed boards at temperatures the data inside can tolerate.
Fine-pitch probe adapters and a growing pinout library reach the memory inside one-piece cards and sticks that have no chip to remove.
XOR patterns, ECC and wear-levelling are unpicked in software until a raw dump reads as your folders and files again.
Snapped connectors and fractured tracks re-worked under magnification — frequently the entire repair for physical damage.
Cards and sticks image through blocked readers, keeping the original flash untouched from arrival to return.
SD to CFexpress, dashcam to drone to wedding camera — the SanDisk Ultra and Extreme families dominate the tray, and their classic failure is a dead or read-only controller sitting on perfectly healthy NAND. Counterfeit 'high-capacity' microSDs from marketplace sellers are the other regular, corrupting as soon as writes wrap the real flash inside.
Most customers post or courier their media to us.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive — we don't provide an internal drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops) — only drives that can be removed and sent to us.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Bristol Data Recovery and we'll call you as soon as we diagnose your media.
Not sure what to send? Call 0800 689 0668 first or use the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, no fix no fee — start now or call the freephone.