Formatting a card writes a new empty index at the front of it and leaves everything else exactly where it was, which is why a formatted card is one of the more recoverable things that arrives here. This page explains the difference between a quick and a full format, why the minutes after the mistake matter more than the mistake, and why a card behaves nothing like a formatted SSD.
A formatted card is £250 + VAT and carries no fix, no fee — nothing usable back means nothing to pay. A quick format replaces the index and leaves the pictures where they are. What costs you files is using the card afterwards, so take it out now.
Not all formats are equal, and the difference between them is most of the answer. Find yours below, then put the card somewhere safe and stop using it.
The card was plugged in, Windows announced that it needed formatting before use, and the button got pressed. This is the most survivable version of all, because the default is a quick format and because the prompt appears when the header is damaged rather than when the card is empty. The pictures are almost certainly still there.
A body formats a card by writing a fresh directory and file allocation area and leaving the rest alone. Nothing is wiped. Everything shot before the format is sitting in the same physical locations until new frames land on top of it, which is why the number of shots taken afterwards matters far more than the format itself.
Two cards, one reader, and the one that mattered was in the slot. Irritating, and usually recoverable, provided the card is taken out immediately. The damage from this is done in the minutes afterwards, when somebody starts copying files onto the newly empty card to check that it works.
A card moved between devices is often reformatted without much of a warning, and some cameras and recorders will format a card they do not recognise. The card is not damaged. What matters is whether the device then started writing to it, because a dash cam or a trail camera will fill a card in hours.
A full format checks every block as it goes and, on Windows 10 and 11, actually clears them. That is a much worse position than a quick format and the honest answer is that a completed full format usually ends it. If a full format was started and stopped early, some of the card may still be intact.
The hardest of the six, and the most common way a straightforward job becomes a partial one. Every file written after the format may land on top of an older one. Nothing is uniformly lost, so it is still worth looking, but the results become a patchwork rather than a complete set.
A quick format does something much smaller than most people imagine. It writes a fresh, empty file allocation table and a fresh root directory at the front of the card, and leaves everything else exactly where it was. Your pictures, video files and documents remain in the same physical cells, byte for byte. What has gone is the list saying which cells belong to which file and what those files were called.
Recovering from that is a matter of finding the files without the list. Every common format leaves a recognisable signature at its start — JPEG, raw files from every camera maker, MP4, MOV, PDF, Office documents — and those signatures can be found by reading the whole card and looking for them. From the signature onwards the file can be followed to its end and written out, complete and openable, with a generic filename instead of the original one. That is why a formatted-card recovery so often gives you everything back but numbered rather than named.
A full format is a different animal. It walks the entire medium checking each block, and on modern Windows it writes zeros as it goes rather than merely reading. Once that has finished there is nothing left to find, and any service claiming otherwise on flash media is not being straight with you. The good news is that hardly anybody chooses a full format by accident, because it takes a long time and the quick option is the default.
The format itself rarely decides the outcome. What decides it is what the card did next. A card taken out of the reader within seconds of the mistake generally gives everything back. A card that went straight back into a camera for another two hundred frames gives back what those frames did not sit on top of, and no one can predict which files that will be until the card is read.
This is the single most useful thing on this page. If a card has just been formatted and it matters, stop now. Do not copy a test file onto it to see if it works. Do not run recovery software that wants to save its results onto the same card. Do not put it back in the camera. Take it out, put it somewhere it cannot be picked up absent-mindedly, and decide what to do next with the card sitting still.
People sometimes ask why formatted cards can be recovered when they have read that a formatted SSD cannot. It comes down to TRIM. A solid state drive inside a computer is told by the operating system which blocks are no longer in use, and its controller then clears them in the background, so deleted or formatted data really does disappear within minutes.
Memory cards in cameras generally do not work that way. There is no operating system issuing those commands to a card in a camera body, and most card readers do not pass them on either, so formatted content sits there until it is physically overwritten. That is why a formatted card and a formatted SSD have such different prospects, and why the advice here is genuinely different from the advice on a laptop drive.
The exception worth naming is the card formatted in a phone or set up as internal storage in one, where TRIM-like behaviour is more common. It is also the case where the encryption a phone applies may make the contents unreadable outside that handset, and phones and tablets are not handled here in any case.
Any memory card is £250 + VAT: SD, microSD, SDHC, SDXC, CompactFlash, XQD, CFexpress, Memory Stick, whatever capacity and whatever the format did. USB sticks and pen drives are the same figure. The rest of the table runs: £300 + VAT for a single hard drive or SSD; £400 + VAT for a CCTV or DVR recorder disk and for BitLocker or otherwise encrypted drives; from £500 + VAT for RAID, NAS, SAN and servers, rising with the member count; £800 + VAT for forensic investigation with a written report, or £400 + VAT for a binary image with deleted-file extraction and no report.
A formatted card is a logical job, so it carries no fix, no fee: if nothing usable comes back, there is nothing to pay. The published exclusions to that guarantee are electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs. The diagnostic costs nothing in every case and closes two working days after the card is booked in, and a card is usually finished within two to four working days of you agreeing the fixed figure.
Put the card in its plastic case, or tape it flat between two pieces of stiff card, and post that inside a padded envelope. Send only the card. Cameras, drones, dash cams and phones are not needed, and phones and tablets are not taken at all.
Include a short note with three things in it: what the card came out of, what happened immediately before and after the format, and what you most want back. If the card was used again afterwards, say how much — it is not a confession, it is the single most useful piece of information for setting expectations honestly. The address is Oxford Data Recovery, John Eccles House, Oxford Science Park, Robert Robinson Avenue, Littlemore, Oxford OX4 4GP, and drop-offs are taken there Monday to Friday between 9:00am and 5:30pm. From Coventry that is an hour down the M40, though for something this small the post makes more sense.
Format in the camera rather than on a computer, once, when the card is empty, and let the body write the layout it expects. Copy each card off to two places before it goes back in the bag. Number your cards and rotate them rather than reusing the same one until it fails. And treat the card reader on a laptop with suspicion, because a tired slot is behind a fair number of the format prompts that start all this.
A quick format swaps the index and leaves the images untouched. Every frame taken after it is what puts them genuinely at risk.
Small media is the simplest thing in the world to send, and the post treats it far better than a week in a coat pocket or a glovebox does. A padded envelope given to a courier in Warwickshire on a weekday tends to be booked in at Oxford the next morning, and you are told the moment it lands.
As a rule the storage comes out and the machine stays where it is. That applies to a laptop, a tower, an iMac and to the recorder sitting under a counter. Taking equipment apart is not something this bench does, and a repair shop will free a drive in a few minutes. Two things go the other way: an external drive stays sealed inside its own case, and a NAS travels as a complete unit with its disks still in their bays. A Fusion Mac is a third case — both of its drives come out and travel together, each one labelled. The single situation nobody can work around is memory soldered flat onto a mainboard, which is how Apple Silicon Macs and a good many slim laptops are built: if the storage will not unbolt, there is no parcel to send.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Put Oxford Data Recovery on the label. From Coventry it is roughly fifty-five miles straight down the M40, about an hour if you would rather drive it in than post it. Either way you are told the moment it is logged, and the free diagnostic finishes two working days later.
Unsure what ought to go in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you seal it, or work through the free online diagnostic and let it do the asking.