A memory stick is three parts in a plastic shell: the flash that holds your files, the controller that manages it, and a connector that gets stood on. Which of the three failed decides both the odds and the price, and the good news is that the most common fault of all, a snapped connector, usually leaves the data completely intact.
USB sticks, pen drives and memory cards are £250 + VAT, diagnosed free first. A snapped connector is board-level work, so it is excluded from no fix, no fee and takes half the quoted figure upfront. Deleted files and format prompts are logical work and carry the guarantee.
A memory stick is a flash chip, a controller and a connector on a small board, and each of the three fails in its own way. What the computer says when you plug it in narrows it down quickly.
The commonest fault of all, and usually the most hopeful. Sticks get caught in a laptop port, stood on, or snapped in a bag. The flash chip is generally untouched and the job is a board-level repair to get one read out of it. That is physical work, so it sits outside no fix, no fee and takes half the figure upfront.
The file system has been damaged, most often by the stick being pulled out mid-write. Say no. The contents are almost always intact and formatting replaces the damaged structure with an empty one. Eject it, put it somewhere safe and let it be read properly rather than repaired in place.
The controller has stopped reporting sensibly, which usually means it has failed or the flash has worn out underneath it. Nothing you can do with a computer will change that, and running repair tools at it only adds writes. This is bench work, and how it goes depends on how the stick is built.
No sound, no light, no entry in Disk Management. Either the board has lost power somewhere between the connector and the controller, or the controller itself has gone. Try one other machine to rule out the port, then stop. Repeatedly plugging in a shorted stick does not improve matters.
A short somewhere on the board. Unplug it and leave it unplugged, because heat is the one thing that damages flash memory in a way nothing can undo. Do not keep it connected while deciding what to do next: every extra minute powered is working against you.
No recycle bin exists on removable media, so a delete is immediate, and a quick format replaces the index while leaving the contents in place. Both are usually recoverable and both have the same rule attached: stop using the stick. Anything written to it now goes on top of what you want back.
A memory stick is a flash chip that stores the data, a controller that manages it and translates for the computer, and a connector and board joining the two to the outside world. When the connector or the board fails, the data is untouched and the work is to restore enough electrical connection to read the chip once. When the controller fails, the data is also untouched but the route to it has gone. When the flash itself wears out, the data is what has been damaged, and that is the least hopeful of the three.
How the stick is built decides how the work is done. Sticks with a conventional board and a separate flash package can often be read through the board once it is repaired. Sticks built as a single sealed package — increasingly common, and normal on small modern designs — have no separate chip to reach, so work on those is specialist chip-level engineering. That falls outside the no fix, no fee guarantee, and the free diagnostic tells you which sort you have before any decision is taken.
Flash memory tolerates a finite number of write cycles, and a stick used as a working drive rather than as a carrier reaches that point far sooner than anybody expects. The first symptoms are a stick that mounts slowly, then reports the wrong size, then does not mount at all. If a stick has started behaving oddly, copy everything off it that day and retire it. They rarely recover on their own.
The other epidemic is capacity that was never there. Cheap high-capacity sticks from marketplace sellers are frequently relabelled to claim far more space than the flash inside holds, and they work perfectly until the point where the real capacity runs out, at which point writes start looping back over earlier data. Files written after that point are usually gone rather than damaged, because they were never stored anywhere in the first place.
A stick protected with BitLocker To Go, or a hardware-encrypted model with a keypad, is recoverable in the ordinary way provided the key, the password or the recovery key can be produced. That is the £400 + VAT band, which covers encrypted media of any kind. Without the key there is nothing anybody can do, and that is the encryption doing exactly what it was bought to do rather than a limitation of any laboratory.
Do not keep plugging it into machine after machine. Do not run repair or format tools at it. Do not use a manufacturer utility that offers to restore the stick to working order, because restoring the stick and recovering the data are opposite objectives — those tools rebuild the controller's tables and are perfectly happy to discard your files while doing it. And if it is hot, unplug it and leave it alone.
Memory sticks, pen drives and memory cards are £250 + VAT. A single hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT. Recorder disks from CCTV systems and encrypted media where the key can be supplied are £400 + VAT. NAS units, RAID arrays, SAN volumes and servers start at £500 + VAT and rise with the member count. Forensic work is £800 + VAT with a full written report or £400 + VAT for a binary image with deleted-file extraction and no report.
The diagnostic costs nothing and closes two working days after the stick is booked in, and the figure that follows is fixed in writing. Logical faults — deleted files, a quick format, a damaged file system — carry no fix, no fee. A snapped connector, a failed controller or chip-level work does not: those are physical and electronic faults, which are excluded from the guarantee and take 50 per cent of the quoted figure upfront.
Deleted or formatted on a healthy stick, used for nothing since: very good odds. Damaged file system after being pulled out mid-write: very good odds. Snapped connector or broken board: good, and it depends on whether the flash package can be reached. Failed controller: reasonable, and it depends on the construction. Worn-out flash, or a fake-capacity stick that has looped over itself: poor, and you will be told that plainly rather than encouraged.
Whatever the answer, the diagnostic is free, so nobody pays to be told no.
Put it in a small rigid box or tape it to stiff card inside a padded envelope, so it is not the one thing in a large parcel taking every knock. If the connector is broken, do not try to straighten it — send the pieces exactly as they are, including anything that came off, because a bent contact bent back once more is a contact that snaps. Include the booking-in form with a name, a number you answer and a note of what happened.
Send it tracked, or hand it in at Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD, Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm. It is roughly 70 miles from Leicester, the M1 south to J19 and then the A14 east, about ninety minutes, with parking outside the door two minutes off Junction 32. There is no counter in Leicester and nobody collects.
A memory stick is a way of carrying files between places. It is not somewhere to keep them. Most of the sticks that arrive here held the only copy of something that mattered — a dissertation for one of the universities, a set of accounts, the photographs from a wedding somebody was asked to take. They are small, they get sat on, they get washed, they get left in a coat. Keep the working copy somewhere else and the stick becomes an inconvenience rather than an emergency.
Heat is the one thing that damages flash in a way nobody can undo, and a shorted stick gets hotter every minute it stays connected.
Cards, sticks and single drives are the easiest things in the world to post, and posting them is gentler than a day of being carried around in a coat pocket. A padded envelope handed over in Leicester tends to reach the Cambridge bench the next working day.
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.