Norfolk is photographed more than most counties, and backed up rather less. Weddings in the Lanes, the boatyards at Wroxham, the light coming off the sea at Cromer and Sheringham: a lot of it travels home on one small card, and that card is the least protected storage that anybody owns. They come to us from working photographers, people who own dashcams, and families who have lost a fortnight abroad, and the pictures usually go back.
Every memory card job is diagnosed free. The quote will be provided in writing, and fixed, before anyone picks up a screwdriver.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Electronic, mechanical, chip-level and physical work is charged at 50% upfront. Ransomware, forensic, BitLocker and CCTV/DVR jobs are charged 100% upfront on acceptance of our fixed quotation. Please refer to the data recovery cost page for full details on costs.
The first task on any memory card is matching the symptom to the fault, and after twenty-odd years these thirty faults cover virtually every job we see walk through our doors.
If the camera, the reader and the laptop all give up at once, this usually points to the controller (or the controller's firmware) rather than the memory. The images are still stored in the NAND and remain completely unaltered, even though nothing can currently ask for them.
A broken file table does not mean your photos have been lost. Agreeing to that prompt is the one sure way to turn a simple job into a difficult one, so take the card out and leave it alone.
Frames will remain in the flash as long as nothing new has been written over them. If you put the card away in a drawer instead of carrying on shooting, most of a deleted folder should come back.
Your camera performs a "quick" format and nothing deeper, so normally the shoot underneath is complete and can be recovered whole. The one thing that spoils it is carrying on using the card.
Cards break in slots, in wallets and in low-quality adapters. If the break misses the inner tracks, we can probe the die itself and read directly from it; this is why broken cards are worth sending rather than throwing away.
That is the controller's "last resort" ID after a crash, and it's a firmware state, not a measurement. From there the job is chip-level work, and quite routine.
A dying controller will lock itself. A slider nudged on the side of an SD card looks exactly the same to your computer. One of these takes about ten seconds to fix, so it's the first thing we check.
Cards survive their accidents far better than most people would think possible. When cleaned, stabilised and read at chip level, a card that went through the washing machine will typically give up everything on it.
Fake cards write new data back over one small genuine chip as soon as it fills. Anything written before that point can be recovered; however, anything written after went nowhere, and no lab can recover data that was never stored.
Half-moved files and a directory cut off in the middle of a sentence. Rather than trust what's left of the file table, the frames are carved out of a raw capture and rebuilt from their own headers.
Continuous recording can use up the flash in just a couple of years. Carving the blocks that are still readable puts your footage back together, and most of the time the clip you needed is among them.
More than any other pattern in our card log, Ultras and Extremes fail at the controller while the memory is healthy. It's very well practised chip-level work, and we get good results.
Since everything is sealed into one piece (the "slab"), there is no package to pull. We map the test points against our pinout records and address the memory directly. It takes longer, but it works.
Type B cards in mirrorless cameras and drones fail hard at cinema bit rates, and the Broads wildlife and wedding crowd really work them hard. Since they are PCIe inside, the NVMe side of the bench handles them.
Bent, cracked and interrupted mid-write, all at once: physical damage on top of a logical mess. Worked strictly in that order, and the endings are better than the state of the airframe would suggest.
An Extreme PRO microSD sealed in a waterproof housing on the coast for a whole summer ages quickly. Heat and vibration bring the read errors forward by a year or two.
Kingston's budget SDCS2 line freezes in a "mute" controller state and stops responding. Once the controller is bypassed, the memory underneath reads without complaint.
Bent socket pins and a shorted interface follow straight after. At this end it's read on a rebuilt socket, and the bent pins are someone else's problem.
Counterfeit Samsungs corrupt at the point where writes wrap past their true capacity. The genuine range carves out cleanly, and the label on the front doesn't fool anyone here.
Long continuous sequences can stall the 633x and 1066x lines and scramble the tail end of a shoot. Rebuilt from a raw read, as opposed to what the card claims about itself.
The power failed before the index was written, so there is no header in the file telling a player where any of the data is. The video data is all there, and we rebuild a structure around it from the stream itself.
Corrupted wear tables create cards full of zero byte ghosts with the correct names and dates. The actual contents are still down in the flash, waiting for a rebuilt mapping.
Cold dry day, card passed between two people, and the controller takes the discharge. Instant, invisible, and repairable at chip level.
No-name readers run cards outside their voltage tolerance and drop them mid-write on a loose plug. The card ends up paying for the saving, and chip level reads settle the account.
Formatted as internal storage means encrypted to that one handset and not usable without it. We say that plainly rather than dressing it up, and phones are outside what we take on in any case.
A card that moves between two camera bodies and a reader makes thousands of connections during its life, and the gold plating is only so thick. Intermittent mounting and files that read once but not twice are the symptoms. On a fresh contact block, most of them behave fine.
A card that was filled up in 2016 and not looked at since has been losing charge from day one. The card may still mount and hand back files, but riddled with errors. Repeated patient reads, giving ECC time to work, recover far more than one hopeful copy.
To record sustained 4K or high bitrate video, you need a write speed the card can hold constantly, not in bursts. When the card can't do this, the camera's buffer gets overrun, clips get cut short and the directory is left describing files that stop early. The footage that did land is carved out. Whatever didn't make it to the card is gone.
A flat battery halfway through a format leaves the card with about half of its old structure and half of a brand-new one, and most hosts then won't accept it at all. This is actually a good outcome (as these things go), since if the format didn't finish, neither did the erasing.
Free tools that offer to repair the card in place, or save recovered files back on to the same card, will overwrite the very blocks they are reading from. It happens every week. Stop at the first sign of trouble and send us the card exactly as it is. Every extra write costs something.
A card is simply a thin layer of NAND and a tiny controller inside a plastic housing; there are no shock mounts, no redundancy, and nothing held in reserve. So we follow one rule: copy first, investigate afterwards. A sector-level duplicate is made before any file is looked at, which spares the original a second knock, and is why an attempt that went wrong somewhere else can usually still be saved. Every common format behaves the same way under that treatment, whether it's SanDisk Extreme Pro and Ultra SDXC, Lexar Professional, Kingston Canvas Select Plus, the Samsung PRO Endurance cards in dashcams and doorbells, Sony TOUGH, older CompactFlash from professional camera bodies, Sony XQD or the CFexpress Type B cards in today's mirrorless kit. Speed class, V30 or V90, A1 or A2: none of it changes the method, only the hours.
Broken cards go to the chip bench instead. In a microSD card there is nothing to separate, since controller, memory and contacts are moulded into a single part, so you have to go in through the test points on the card's body. Probe those, take a raw dump, then rebuild that dump into files that a computer will happily open. Whether it works depends on whether the break spared the inside tracks, which the free assessment determines rather than guessing. Full-size SD cards are kinder, since the controller and memory are separate parts on a small board, and a crack in the plastic housing often means nothing at all. Salt air near the coast and a summer in a camera bag slowly work on the contacts too, which clean up more often than not.
Card work is microsurgery over bare flash and uses the same specialist rigs as sticks and single slab devices:
Reads the memory chips directly and rebuilds in software the arithmetic that the dead controller used to do. When a stick or card doesn't respond at all, this is where the conversation starts again.
Hot air and infrared profiles are set so a memory package can come off a ruined board while the charge stored in it stays where it is. The whole skill is temperature control and patience.
Some cards have no separate chip to lift. The test points are identified against our pinout records and wired out by hand under magnification. It's slow work, and the only way to get those cards read.
The XOR, ECC and wear levelling puzzle is worked through until a raw dump reads back as named folders. Unglamorous arithmetic, but it has a good ending.
Lifted pads, torn tracks and sheared plugs are rebuilt under magnification. A fair share of sticks written off as dead need this and nothing more.
Every stick and card is read behind a blocked interface, so the original memory goes home in exactly the state it arrived in.
The Extreme PRO family and the Ultra SDSQUAB dominate the tray, and nine times out of ten the controller has failed while the memory is in perfect condition. CFexpress Type B is the part of the trade that keeps growing: wildlife photographers shooting around the Broads and along the coast at Cromer and Sheringham, and wedding shooters covering venues throughout Norfolk, all run these cards so hard there is no margin left, and when a Type B card fails it usually happens with no warning. The Lexar Professional 633x and 1066x lines tend to stall on long bursts. The Canvas Select Plus will simply go silent at the controller. The EVO Select and PRO Plus turn up in counterfeit versions as often as genuine ones, and corrupt cleanly at the point where writes wrap past the true capacity. Dashcam and doorbell cards need a separate note: looping wears out the flash and nothing else, and the footage comes back by carving whatever blocks held on.
Most items arrive at this bench by insured and tracked post. We recommend getting a quote first, either by telephone or using our free online diagnostic, and once you have received your quote, simply post the item. Post is the steadiest way to move a poorly drive, and a parcel sent from Norfolk typically arrives on the bench within a working day.
Is the drive still bolted inside a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV / DVR recorder? Before sending, remove the hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD), as we do not accept whole units. From a DVR or recorder, send just the disk. From a server or RAID, take out the disks and clearly label each disk by bay number. A network attached storage (NAS) device may be sent as its disks if they can be removed; otherwise please send the NAS itself. There is only one type of drive we are unable to accept: storage soldered onto a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs, extremely thin laptops). In such cases, if the storage cannot be taken out it cannot be accepted. If you are unsure whether you have a removable drive or not, call us before sending anything.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Please mark the parcel for the attention of Cambridge Data Recovery. It takes about an hour and twenty minutes to travel from Norwich along the A11, then two minutes off the A14 at Junction 32. Otherwise you can post it using a tracked service and we will receive it the following working day. We will contact you as soon as we have your drive and it is booked onto our bench.
If you're unsure of what to include in the box, please call us on 0800 689 0668 before sealing it. Or, for a first view on what we can do, you can use our free online diagnostic.
Free diagnosis, one fixed figure written down, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start online or ring us.