A great deal gets photographed around Merseyside and very little of it gets backed up. Wedding days across the city, gigs and studio sessions in the Baltic Triangle, the river light at the Pier Head, an early start on the sand at Crosby or Formby. Nearly all of it travels home on one small card, and a card is the least protected thing anybody owns. They turn up here from professional photographers, from dashcam owners, and from families who have mislaid a fortnight abroad. The pictures generally go back.
Every memory card job is diagnosed free. One fixed figure follows in writing, agreed before a screwdriver comes out of the drawer.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Every band is listed on the data recovery cost page.
Matching the symptom to the fault underneath is the first job on any memory card, and after twenty-odd years these thirty account for very nearly everything that arrives.
When the camera, the reader and the laptop all draw a blank together, the fault sits in the controller or its firmware rather than in the memory. The photographs are still in the NAND. Nothing on the outside can currently ask for them.
That is a damaged file table talking, not missing pictures. Say yes and an easy job becomes a hard one. Take the card out of the body and leave it alone.
Frames sit in the flash until something else is written over them. Stop shooting, put the card somewhere safe, and a deleted folder usually comes back more or less whole.
Cameras only ever perform a quick format, so the shoot underneath is usually complete and lifts out whole. Carrying on using the card afterwards is the one thing that spoils it.
Cards give way in slots, in back pockets and in cheap adapters. Where the break has missed the internal tracks the die gets probed and read directly, which is why a broken card is worth posting rather than binning.
A crashed controller falls back to a default identity, and that figure is it. Nothing has shrunk. It is a firmware state, and from there the work is chip level and entirely routine.
Two causes look identical to a computer: a controller that has locked itself as it fails, and a write-protect slider nudged on the side of an SD card. One of them takes ten seconds, so that is the one checked first.
Cards come through their accidents better than owners expect. Clean it, stabilise it, read it at chip level, and a card that has been round a hot wash generally hands back everything it was holding.
A fake holds one small genuine chip, and once that chip is full the writes simply fold back over the start of it. Anything recorded before the fold-over comes back. Anything after it was never stored anywhere, and nothing retrieves what was never written.
Files stop mid-transfer and the directory ends in the middle of a sentence. Instead of trusting whatever survives of the file table, the frames get carved straight out of a raw capture, each one rebuilt around the header it carries.
Continuous recording spends the flash inside two years or so. Carve the blocks that still read and the footage returns. The clip somebody rang about is generally in there.
More entries in the card log here are Ultras and Extremes with a dead controller above sound memory than anything else. The chip-level route for them is well rehearsed and it works.
Everything is moulded into one slab, so there is no package to lift. Test points get matched to our pinout records and the flash is then addressed straight through them. It takes longer and it works.
Push a Type B card at cinema data rates, in a mirrorless body or a drone, and when it fails it fails hard. Internally they are PCIe devices, so they go to the NVMe side of the bench rather than the card side.
Bent, cracked and interrupted mid-write, all in the same accident: physical damage on top of logical mess. Worked in that order and no other, and the results generally look a lot healthier than the airframe does.
An Extreme PRO microSD sealed in a waterproof housing through a summer on the water ages quickly. Heat and vibration together pull the first read errors forward by a year, sometimes two.
The budget SDCS2 line from Kingston locks into a mute controller state and stops replying to anything. Get past that state and the memory below it reads without a murmur.
Bent socket pins and a shorted interface arrive together within a second. Here the card gets read on a rebuilt socket. The bent pins belong to whoever owns the camera.
Fake Samsungs go wrong precisely where the writing loops back past the genuine size. The real span carves out cleanly. The printed badge convinces nobody at this end.
Hold the shutter down long enough and a 633x or 1066x card can hang, scrambling the tail end of a shoot. It gets rebuilt from a raw read, not from anything the card claims about itself.
Power went before the index was written, so the file has no header to tell a player where anything is. All the video is present. The structure gets rebuilt around it from the stream.
Wear-table corruption leaves a card full of ghosts wearing the right names and dates. The real contents are further down in the flash, waiting for the mapping to be rebuilt.
A cold dry day, a card passed between two people, and the discharge goes straight through the controller. Instant, invisible, and repairable at chip level.
An unbranded reader runs a card outside its voltage tolerance, then drops it mid-write when the plug wobbles. The card pays for the saving. Chip-level reads settle the account.
A card formatted as internal storage is encrypted against that one handset and worthless without it. We put that plainly rather than dressing it up. Phones sit outside our intake in any case.
Shuttle a card between two camera bodies and a reader and it will make several thousand insertions before it retires. Gold plating is only so thick. What follows is mounting that comes and goes, plus files that read once and refuse the second time. Set on a fresh contact block, most cards behave perfectly well.
A card filled in 2016 and left in a drawer has been leaking charge ever since. It may well still mount and hand back files full of errors. Patient repeated reads, with the ECC given room, bring back a great deal more than one hopeful copy would.
Sustained 4K and high-bitrate video demand a write speed the card has to hold continuously rather than in short bursts. Fall short of it and the buffer inside the camera overflows, clips end up truncated, and the directory lists files that stop early. Whatever landed is carved out. Whatever never arrived is gone.
Interrupt a format halfway and the card keeps half its old structure alongside half a new one, at which point most hosts refuse it outright. As accidents go this is a good one. A format that stopped early also stopped erasing early.
Free utilities offer to mend a card where it sits, or to write recovered files back onto the card they came off, and both overwrite the blocks they are reading. We see it most weeks. At the first sign of trouble, stop, and send the card exactly as it is. Every extra write costs something.
Strip the plastic away and a memory card is a piece of NAND with a small controller beside it. There is no shock mounting, no spare capacity held back, and nothing to fail over to. That is why the order of operations here never varies: duplicate the whole thing at sector level before a single file gets opened. Working on a copy keeps the original off the bench for a second time, and it is the reason a card somebody else has already had a go at is usually still worth attempting. The format on the label makes no odds. SanDisk Extreme Pro and Ultra SDXC. Lexar Professional. Kingston Canvas Select Plus. Samsung PRO Endurance, the type fitted to dashcams and video doorbells. Sony TOUGH. CompactFlash out of the older professional bodies. Sony XQD, and the CFexpress Type B cards in the current mirrorless generation. V30 or V90, A1 or A2, none of that alters the approach, only how many hours it runs for.
Physically damaged cards move over to the chip bench. There is nothing to take apart inside a microSD, since the controller, the memory and the contacts are all cast into one solid block, so the route in is through the test points on the body of the card. Probe those, pull a raw dump off the silicon, then reconstruct that dump into files any computer will open. Whether it succeeds comes down to whether the break went through the internal tracks or missed them, and that is what the free assessment determines instead of anybody guessing. Full-size SD cards are gentler work, because the controller and the memory sit as separate parts on a little circuit board, and a cracked shell on one of those often signifies nothing whatsoever. Damp air off the docks and a summer spent at the bottom of a camera bag both go quietly to work on the contacts, and that sort of corrosion usually cleans off.
Cards are microsurgery over bare flash. The rigs listed below handle them, and handle sticks and sealed one-piece devices as well:
Talks to the memory chips directly and reproduces in software the arithmetic a failed controller can no longer do. When a card has stopped answering altogether, this is where the conversation picks up again.
Infrared and hot-air profiles tuned so the memory package lifts clear of a ruined board with the charge in its cells left undisturbed. All of the skill is in temperature control and patience.
Plenty of microSD cards have no separate chip to remove. Their test points get found against our pinout records, then hand-wired under magnification. It is slow, and no other method reads them.
XOR, ECC and wear levelling unpicked step by step until a raw dump comes back looking like folders with names on them. Unglamorous arithmetic, good endings.
Torn tracks, lifted pads and sheared contacts rebuilt under magnification. A fair number of cards declared dead elsewhere want this and no other treatment.
Reading happens behind a blocked interface at every stage, so a card goes home in the state it arrived in and not one byte different.
Most of the tray is Extreme PRO and Ultra SDSQUAB, and in nine cases out of ten it is the controller that has failed above memory in perfect health. The growing corner of this trade is CFexpress Type B. Wildlife photographers on the Dee estuary and in the Sefton dunes, and wedding shooters working venues from the waterfront out to Knowsley, Chester and the Wirral, run Type B with no margin whatever, and those cards give no warning at all before they go. Lexar Professional 633x and 1066x cards hang on long bursts. Canvas Select Plus cards go mute at the controller. EVO Select and PRO Plus arrive counterfeit about as often as genuine, breaking neatly at the point the writing loops past the true size. Dashcam and doorbell cards earn a line of their own, since looping wears flash out and does nothing else, and their footage comes back by carving whichever blocks survived. A card costs £250 + VAT, the diagnostic ahead of it is free, and it reports two working days after the card lands at the lab.
Almost every job on this bench came in by tracked, insured post. It is the calmest way to move a drive that is already struggling, and a parcel handed in anywhere on Merseyside usually reaches the bench the following working day.
Still screwed inside a laptop, tower, MacBook, iMac, server or a CCTV recorder? Take the drive out and post that on its own. We do not strip machines here, and any computer shop will do it in a few minutes. The one job nobody can take on is flash soldered straight to a logic board, as on Apple Silicon Macs and a handful of very slim laptops: if the storage will not unbolt, there is nothing to send.
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Address it to Manchester Data Recovery. It is roughly 35 miles from Liverpool along the M62 if you fancy the run, and next working day by tracked post if you do not. We ring or email the moment it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes 2 working days after that.
Not sure what belongs in the parcel? Call 0800 689 0668 before you tape it shut, or step through the free online diagnostic first.
Diagnosis free, one figure written down, and £300 + VAT covers a single drive or SSD. Start online or ring.