A great deal gets photographed around Leicestershire and very little of it ever gets copied anywhere afterwards. Weddings, race meetings, Saturday morning sport, a first proper walk of the year through Bradgate Park, a day out at Foxton Locks. Nearly all of it comes home on one small card, and nothing anybody owns is less protected than a card. They arrive here from working photographers, from dashcam owners, and from families who have mislaid a fortnight abroad. The pictures usually go back.
Every memory card that arrives here is examined at no charge. The figure quoted afterwards is put in writing and settled before anybody reaches for a screwdriver: £250 + VAT on a memory card, a pen drive or a USB stick.
Logical recoveries carry no fix, no fee. The named exceptions to it are electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs; physical work takes 50% up front. The five bands are set out in full on the data recovery cost page.
Tracing a symptom back to the failure underneath it is where the real work begins, and these thirty account for all but a handful of the boxes opened at the Cambridge bench. A fault missing from the list is not an unfamiliar one — describe it on the telephone and you will get a straight view of the odds before you spend anything on postage.
Both are reading the same broken header and both are proposing the same cure. Behind it the images have not moved. Say no in the camera, say no on the laptop, take the card out, and let somebody read it at block level instead of at file level.
Deleting on a camera only clears the directory entries. The picture data is still occupying the same blocks it always did, and it stays there until something writes over it. The single decision that matters is not putting the card back in the camera. Every subsequent frame is written over what you want back.
A camera format writes a new file system and leaves the image data untouched underneath in nearly every case. Recovery is carving by file signature rather than by directory, and it works well. What ruins it is shooting a few test frames afterwards to check the card still works.
Usually the controller inside the card losing its mapping table under sustained writing. Cards run hot in a busy body and the cheap ones run hottest. Everything already committed is generally still there. Stop shooting, take it out, and put a different card in the camera.
microSD cards break at the contacts and full-size SD cards crack across the body. Whether the flash package survived is the only question, and it is answered by inspection rather than by guesswork. Where the package is intact the contents come back, because on a card the package is nearly the whole device.
The camera is reading the small preview stored inside each file header and failing on the full image behind it. That points at the mapping layer handing out inconsistent blocks. Reading the card raw and reassembling the files properly gives back full-size images rather than postage stamps.
Pulling a card out mid-copy, or losing battery during one, can leave the file system half updated. The files themselves are complete. What has gone is the index, and rebuilding an index from the data it points at is one of the more reliable jobs on this bench.
Three devices agreeing means the card is not presenting a usable file system to anything. That is not the same as the card being blank. Controller faults, damaged headers and worn wear-levelling tables all look identical from outside and are told apart on the bench.
The controller has fallen back on a default identity because its translation table is gone. On a memory card the whole device is that controller plus a package or two of flash, so restoring the table restores everything. Where the controller will not respond, the package is read directly.
Continuous video and high frame-rate stills push a small controller hard. When it overheats it stops, and repeated attempts at the same thing keep pushing it back over the same edge. Read it cool, in short passes, and considerably more comes off.
Counterfeit cards are the single most common cause of loss on this bench. The firmware is told to report a capacity the flash does not have, so a card sold as 512GB may hold 32GB and quietly wrap around after that, overwriting the earliest files. What comes back is whatever was genuinely stored.
Cards survive water surprisingly often, and they do not survive being dried on a radiator and then pushed into a reader. Corrosion continues under the surface until it is cleaned off properly. Send it damp, wrapped, with a note saying what happened, rather than trying to prove it still works.
The lock switch on a full-size card is a mechanical flag read by the reader, and a worn one gets stuck on. That is not a data fault at all. A card genuinely locked by its own controller after a wear threshold is a different matter, and in that case everything on it is still readable.
Loop recording overwrites the oldest clip when the card fills, which on a small card can be a matter of hours. If the incident is still on the card it comes back. If the camera has kept running for two days since, most of it has been genuinely replaced, and you should hear that before spending anything.
Left in a hedge in Charnwood for three months, exposed to condensation and temperature swings, and then read once. Cards in that service fail at the contacts and at the file system rather than in the flash itself, and the pictures are usually all present once the card is read properly.
That is a Windows autorun infection picked up from another machine rather than a card fault. The original files are hidden rather than destroyed. It gets cleaned and read on an isolated bench, and the card should not be put back into the machine it was infected by.
The controller has stopped responding. On a card there is no motor and no mechanism to have degraded, so the flash is nearly always intact behind it. Reading the package directly is standard work here and is what most of these end up needing.
Thousands of insertions wear the gold off. Green corrosion means moisture has been in there for a while. Both are cleaned and inspected under magnification before any attempt to read, because forcing a poor contact repeatedly is how a readable card becomes an unreadable one.
Long recordings are written as one enormous file and a single unreadable region takes out everything after it as far as a player is concerned. The data past that point is still present. Repairing the container, or splitting and re-indexing it, brings back the rest of the clip.
The last file is truncated and the file system is left mid-update. Everything before it is fine. This is a five-minute job at block level and an impossible one with the card in a camera, which is why the advice is always to stop rather than to keep trying.
Removable cards are handled here in the ordinary way, at the ordinary card price, whatever device they came out of. What is not handled is the phone itself or its internal storage, and that limit is absolute. Take the card out and send the card.
These are effectively NVMe modules in a rugged shell and they fail like NVMe rather than like SD. Controller faults and thermal drop-outs dominate. They are read on the flash bench with the appropriate adapter and they are still priced as a card at 250 pounds + VAT.
CF cards turn up from photographers who never changed system and from machine tools and test rigs that were built around them. The connector has pins that bend, and a bent pin in a camera slot can damage the card. Straightened, cleaned and read, they generally give everything up.
Either a counterfeit reporting a false size, or a genuine card whose spare block pool is exhausted and which has started refusing writes. In the second case everything already on it is readable in full, which makes it a good moment to copy the lot off and retire the card.
It happens on every busy job. The good news is that a format followed by a partial reshoot still leaves the older material underneath in most of the space. Send both cards, say which was which, and stop using either.
A truncated or partly overwritten raw file will be rejected outright by the manufacturer's own software while still containing a usable image. Repairing the header, or extracting the embedded full-size preview, recovers a picture that was otherwise being reported as gone.
Charge leaks out of flash cells whether the card is in use or not. Cards from a wedding fifteen years ago are read here regularly and most of them still give everything back, though the error correction has more work to do each year. Nothing improves by leaving it longer.
Say so on the booking form rather than leaving it to be discovered. Some of these tools write their own working files onto the card they are scanning, and knowing what has been run and for how long determines the safest order to work in. It does not usually rule out a recovery.
Some cameras, drones and body-worn recorders encrypt to the device. The data reads off the flash perfectly and is meaningless without the device or its key. This gets established during the free assessment, and you are told plainly rather than charged for an attempt with no prospect.
A card moved into a different camera, printer or television is frequently reformatted by that device without a clear warning. The images underneath survive the operation. Take the card straight out of whatever reformatted it and send it before anything writes to it again.
Deleting on a camera, or formatting in the body by mistake, does not remove the pictures. It clears the index that points at them and leaves the image data occupying exactly the blocks it always did. That is why a card that has just been formatted is usually recoverable in full, and why the single most damaging thing anyone does afterwards is put the card back in the camera to check it still works. Every test frame is written over something. The same applies to shooting a few more pictures because the shoot has to continue, which is understandable and expensive. Take the card out, put a different one in the body, and leave the first alone. Cards do not deteriorate while they are sitting on a desk. The other habit worth breaking is running the first recovery utility a search offers up, because several of them write their own working files onto the card they are scanning. If one has already been run, say so on the booking form. It rarely rules a recovery out and it always changes the order the work is done in.
Two things about cards are worth knowing before anything goes wrong. The first is that the single commonest cause of loss on this bench is not a fault at all, it is a counterfeit. Cards sold cheaply through marketplaces are shipped with the firmware told to report a capacity the flash does not physically have, so a card marked 512GB may hold 32GB and quietly wrap round after that, overwriting the earliest files with no warning. What comes back from one of those is whatever genuinely fitted, and the rest was never stored. The second is construction. Most microSD cards are a single moulded block with the controller and the memory on one assembly, so there is nothing to unsolder and no separate chip to lift. Reaching the data means grinding carefully down to the test pads and wiring onto them individually, which is slow and delicate and is the only route into a card built that way. Any card is £250 + VAT whichever of those applies, with the assessment free and closing two working days after it is booked in. Where the work turns out to be chip-level, half the fee is taken up front and it sits outside no fix, no fee, and that is said before you commit rather than afterwards.
A memory card is a controller and a flash package, and very little else, so the work is entirely about reading those two things without letting anything write back. What follows is a small bench compared with the disk side, but a busy one, because cards carry more that cannot be replaced than anything else in this building.
Full-size SD, microSD, CompactFlash, CFexpress, XQD, Memory Stick and SmartMedia, each read through hardware blocking. A great many cards declared dead by a laptop's built-in slot read perfectly on a proper reader, and that gets tested before anything more involved happens.
Cards use the same families of flash controllers as pen drives, and most of them have a diagnostic path. Restoring a collapsed translation table through that path returns the card whole, which is always preferable to taking it apart.
Most microSD cards are a single moulded block with controller and flash on one die assembly, so there is nothing to unsolder. Access means grinding down to the test pads and wiring onto them directly. It is slow, it is delicate, and it is the only route into a card of that construction.
Where the file system has gone, images and video are recovered by recognising their own structure: JPEG and raw headers, MOV and MP4 atoms, AVCHD streams. Cameras write predictably, and that predictability is what makes carving from a formatted card work as well as it does.
Worn gold, corrosion and bent CF pins dealt with before any attempt to read. Forcing a marginal contact over and over is a reliable way of turning a card that could have been read into one that cannot.
A long recording that stops playing partway through has usually lost its index rather than its content. Rebuilding the container structure brings back the remainder of the clip, which matters most on dashcam and body-camera work where the useful part is often at the end.
Any card is 250 pounds + VAT, the same figure as a USB stick or pen drive, and the assessment beforehand costs nothing and closes two working days after the card is booked in. Deleted, formatted and corrupted cards are logical work and covered by no fix, no fee. Where a monolithic microSD has to be ground down to its test pads that becomes chip-level work, which sits outside the guarantee and takes 50% up front, and you are told which of the two you are looking at before you commit to anything. Two things ruin more card jobs than every hardware fault combined: putting the card back in the camera after a deletion, and running a recovery utility that writes its own files onto the card it is scanning. If either has already happened, say so on the booking form, because it changes the order the work is done in rather than ending it.
The post office does most of the work of getting a job here. A drive that is already unwell travels better boxed and insured than rattling around a car for a day of errands, and something dropped into a Leicestershire postbox this afternoon is generally logged in at Cambridge tomorrow.
The general rule is the drive travels and the machine stays behind — out of the laptop, out of the tower, out of the iMac, out of the recorder under the counter. This bench does not dismantle equipment, and a repair shop will do it while you wait. Three things are the other way round, and getting them wrong costs you the recovery: an external drive stays sealed in its own case, a NAS comes as a complete unit, and a WD My Passport or My Book travels whole with its cable, because on those the encryption key is held on the bridge board rather than on the disk — separate the two and the data becomes unreadable even to us. A Fusion Mac needs both of its drives, each labelled. The one thing nobody can work round is flash soldered onto the mainboard, as on Apple Silicon machines: if it will not come off, there is nothing to post.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it to Cambridge Data Recovery. It is about seventy miles from Leicester if you fancy driving it — M1 south to Junction 19, then the A14 east — and the lab is two minutes off Junction 32 with parking at the door. Posting costs you a stamp and a day instead. Whichever you choose, you hear from us the moment it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes two working days after that.
Not certain what belongs in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you tape it up, or let the free online diagnostic ask the questions for you.
A quick format swaps the index and leaves every picture where it lay
Nothing broken except a handful of bytes sitting in the wrong place
A whole dissertation, or a month of payroll, on one plastic stub
Cards deleted in-camera, and what the next shoot does to the odds
The examination is free, one written figure follows it, and the band covering this page is £250 + VAT on a memory card, a pen drive or a USB stick.