A whole dissertation; the company accounts; a decade of photos; all entrusted to a thumb-sized stick that then bends in a socket or dies before it gets half way through a copy. The flash drives and pen drives that come into our lab are sent from throughout Swansea, and the little envelope that carries them is usually followed back home by the data.
All USB sticks/flash drives are given free diagnostics prior to recovery. Each customer will receive a single written price quote before we start any work on their project.
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 USB stick/flash drive job starts with it being matched against the possible faults, and these fifteen ways they can fail cover just about everything that reaches the bench.
Levered to one side while in a port, then re-soldered under magnification, or completely circumvented using a direct memory read.
Although Windows detects something has attached itself to the computer, upon sending data to that device it receives only garbage back, so either the controller or firmware has failed.
The controller awakens without having knowledge of how its own memory is mapped, which makes it a chip-off and rebuild job.
Data may be intact but there is a broken file table sitting over it for Windows to find, so never accept that offer to format.
They are still around until something else is written to disk, so your USB stick now belongs in a desk drawer, not the USB port.
If your controller has shorted (or if you have a shorted NAND chip) it will slowly heat itself up, so pull the plug on this one for good.
USB sticks left in laptop ports flex back and forth until the solder joints crack, but once those joints break, the chips inside usually don't care.
The stick is an all-in-one design with no part to remove, so we go straight from probe to pin-out library.
The sticks will surprisingly often withstand the washing process as long as they have been properly cleaned and dried from the wash at our bench.
Files which were hidden and changed to links on a shared computer, but the original files usually remain available.
A '1TB' marketplace deal for a drive that loops over only 16GB of actual flash memory, and the real data is carved out from it.
The SanDisk Cruzer Blades become unusable (zero capacity) when their firmware becomes corrupted, but the NAND itself is good and can be read chip-off.
Kingston DTs freeze up and will no longer respond, but we read the NAND directly by going around the dead controller.
Free conference gifts have lottery-quality controller chips, and the chip inside determines the way to recover, not the logo.
A bent but not broken stick often has only hairline track damage, and after being repaired it is read in full.
Regardless of what you name it (flash drive, pen drive, memory stick), it posts for next to nothing (pennies), making it the single most commonly received item in the post we get from Swansea. Sticks jammed sideways into ports, solder joints that had cracked, the board folded over at the connector. All classics, and all very repairable. We either fix the broken solder joint under a microscope, or if the electronics are past saving we will simply bypass the board and read the NAND directly.
Deleted a folder you needed or plugged into a shared machine and found every file turned into shortcuts? Stop using the stick immediately, so nothing is overwritten and nothing is lost twice. We image the flash in full first then carve out the documents, spreadsheets and pictures from that raw copy. The less the stick is handled after the mistake, the fuller the results will be.
First and last, our lab recovers sticks through their chip(s). That means our flash bench is specifically set up for this type of chip work:
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.
Cruzer Blades and DataTravelers hold roughly half of all of South Wales' coursework and accounts between them; both devices also suffer with one signature problem, namely the Cruzer dropping to 0MB and the DataTraveler's frozen controller, which chip off reading fixes. The free USB sticks that are typically handed out at conferences are essentially wildcards inside, as the controller we find on the board picks the recovery path.
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.