Card work is the steadiest thing on this bench and very little of it is holiday snaps. It is the survey footage off a drone, the photographic record of a restoration job, the trail-camera media out of a yard, the dash cam clip somebody needs after a shunt on the ring road, the second shooter's cards from a Kenilworth wedding. All of it lives on one small object that nobody ever copies twice. Any card is £250 + VAT and the look that comes first costs nothing.
Looking at a memory card costs nothing. What comes out of that examination is one written figure, agreed between us before anybody picks up a screwdriver: £250 + VAT on a memory card, a pen drive or a USB stick.
Logical work is no fix, no fee. Four things sit outside that: electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic work, and anything physical is half up front. All five bands are laid out on the data recovery cost page, while data recovery services follows a postal job from the parcel to the answer.
Tracing a symptom back to whatever caused it is where the job genuinely starts, and these thirty cover very nearly every box opened on the Oxford bench. A fault that is not on the list is not an unfamiliar one: describe it over the telephone and you will get a straight reading of the odds before you have spent a penny on postage.
The body has been happily writing all morning and then refuses the card between one frame and the next. In most cases the images already recorded are entirely intact and what has failed is the small allocation area at the front. Take the card out, leave it out, and resist the temptation to try one more shot to see whether it has settled down, because that shot is written straight over the area being repaired.
Three devices and no response from any of them. That points at the card controller rather than at the memory holding your pictures, which is the whole reason a dead secure digital card is not the same thing as a lost one. The flash underneath is usually in perfect condition and unreachable only because nothing outside the card knows how the controller arranged it.
The camera reports a shot as saved before the file system entry describing it has necessarily reached the card. Interrupt that and you get a card that lists most of the pictures and loses the last few, or one that will not mount at all. It is the single commonest cause of a corrupt card and it is entirely avoidable by waiting for the light.
A 128GB card reporting 32MB, or nothing at all. The controller has fallen back to a default state because it cannot validate its own tables, which is a protective response rather than a report on the contents. Cards in this condition frequently come back in full through the controller's own diagnostic path.
MicroSD cards in full-size adapters get levered sideways, and full-size cards get bent by being pushed into a slot at an angle. A secure digital card is mostly plastic around a small assembly, so a cracked shell says nothing about whether the contents survive. Send every fragment, including the piece still in the adapter.
Grey boxes in the preview, video that reports zero length, JPEGs that render half an image and dissolve into coloured bands. Partly written frames of that kind come from an interrupted write or from a region of memory that is failing, and a good proportion of them can be rebuilt from the raw data rather than through the file system that is describing them badly.
Not the tab on the side, but the card deciding on its own account that it will no longer accept writes. Controllers do this when the spare block pool is exhausted. It is the last warning you get, and the correct response is to copy everything off it immediately, exactly as it stands, before doing anything else at all.
Worth ruling out before anything is posted, because it costs nothing. The small slider on the edge of a full-size card presses a switch inside the reader, and both the slider and the switch wear out. A card that suddenly refuses writes in one reader and behaves in another is a mechanical problem in the reader, not a fault in the card.
The gold pads on the back of a card are thin, and a card that has been in and out of a body a few thousand times wears through them. Corrosion does the same job faster in a damp glovebox or an outbuilding. Forcing a marginal contact repeatedly is a reliable way of turning an intermittent card into a dead one; here it is cleaned and inspected under magnification before any attempt to read it.
Heat means something on the card is drawing current it should not, and every further insertion risks finishing the job. High-speed cards in fast bodies do get warm in ordinary use, but a card too hot to hold comfortably after a few seconds in a reader is a card that should be left alone from that moment on.
A great many cheap high-capacity cards are small cards with the firmware rewritten to report a size they do not have. They appear to work until the writing wraps around, at which point the earliest material is destroyed rather than merely mislaid. If a 512GB card cost eleven pounds, that is very likely what happened, and no recovery reaches what has been written over.
Cards survive water more often than people expect, provided nobody powers one up while it is damp and nobody puts one on a radiator to dry. What ruins them is corrosion afterwards, so the sooner it reaches a bench the better. Do not use a hairdryer and do not put it in rice, both of which are actively unhelpful.
A dashcam writes continuously and overwrites its oldest clips once the card is full, which is the entire point of the design and also the reason there is a deadline on the incident you want. If the clip matters, take the card out of the camera on the day. Where a protected file has merely lost its index it is usually recoverable; where the loop has genuinely written over it, it is gone.
Cards in wildlife cameras, gate cameras and yard installations around the Warwickshire farms and smallholdings live through months of condensation and temperature swings. They come in corroded, with damaged contacts and file systems that have been half-written thousands of times. High-endurance cards exist precisely for this duty and ordinary cards are frequently used instead.
A long recording that halts partway through has generally lost its index rather than its content, because most video containers write the map of the file at the end and cannot finish it if the recording was interrupted. Rebuilding the container structure brings the whole clip back, and it is one of the more satisfying jobs on this bench.
Camera raw formats carry a great deal of structure, and a partly damaged one will be rejected outright by the software that normally reads it while still containing nearly all of the image. Those are worked at the file level and repaired individually where it is worth doing. Say which body the card came out of, because the format decides the method.
Filenames replaced with symbols, directories that have become tiny link files, sizes that make no sense. That is either a damaged file allocation structure or a card that has been through an infected machine. In both cases the pictures are usually present and simply no longer described properly, and both are worked from an image rather than from the card.
Cards give no warning at all. There is no noise, no slowdown, no gradual decline; the controller either answers or it does not, and the day it stops is normally the first hint that anything was wrong. That is why the advice to copy a card off as soon as you are home is worth more than any amount of brand loyalty.
Type A and Type B cards are, in effect, small solid state drives with an NVMe controller inside them, which makes them faster in use and different to work on. They fail at the controller like any other flash device, and the value of what is on one is usually a working day rather than a weekend. They are read here on the flash bench at the ordinary card price.
The format that CFexpress replaced, still in daily use in a lot of professional bodies bought before the change. XQD cards are rugged and they do fail, generally at the controller. Readers for them are not something most people have, which is another reason a card that appears dead at home is worth a proper look on a bench that has the right hardware.
CF is still everywhere: in older professional cameras, in industrial controllers, in medical and survey equipment, and in machine tools around the engineering shops in Coventry and Rugby that have been running the same program for fifteen years. The pins bend, which is the classic CF fault, and bent pins are straightened under magnification rather than pushed.
Reporting itself full at a fraction of its stated capacity, or refusing to write while showing free space. That is normally the controller retiring blocks faster than it can compensate for, and it means the card is at the end of its working life. Copy it now. It will not improve and the working windows get shorter each time.
The card you needed went back in the bag and its twin went back in the camera. What is recoverable depends entirely on how much was written afterwards: a few frames on top of a full card leaves nearly everything, and a full day of shooting on top leaves very little. Stop using both cards and send them together.
Small cards in devices that vibrate, get hot and lose power abruptly. The card in a drone that came down hard is often the only record of the flight, and the card in an action camera has usually been recording at a high bit rate onto a format that was never designed for it. Both come in regularly and both are ordinary work here.
Flash holds charge and charge leaks, so a card put away as the record of a holiday or a wedding can come back with regions that no longer read reliably. Reading at a low level with adjusted thresholds recovers much of it. The general point is worth stating: no card, of any brand, is archival storage.
A scan that saves its results back onto the medium it is scanning writes over the very material it is looking for, and hours of continuous reading is exactly the load that finishes off a card with a failing controller. If this has already happened, say so on the booking form. It changes the order the work is done in rather than ending it.
Some body cameras, some professional video recorders and a number of specialist devices encrypt the card as they write to it. Without the device, or its key, an image of the card is mathematics rather than photographs. This is one of the honest limits on this page, and it is established at the diagnostic stage at no cost to you.
A card moved from a camera to a phone, a drone or a printer, and the new device decided to prepare it for its own use. What happens next depends on how thorough that preparation was and on how much has been recorded since. The material is often still there under a fresh empty index, and that is exactly what a rebuild from an image is for.
Most microSD cards are a single moulded block: controller and memory in one sealed assembly with no separate package to lift. Reaching the data means grinding down to the test points inside the package and wiring onto them under magnification. It works often enough to be worth attempting, it is chip-level work at 50% up front and outside no fix, no fee, and it is not possible on a card that has been snapped through the middle.
A format writes a new empty index rather than erasing the pictures, so a card formatted by mistake and then left alone is usually a very good outcome. A card formatted and then used for another two days is a much poorer one, because the new material lands directly on top of the old. There is a page on this site devoted to formatted cards specifically.
Full-size and micro SD cards have a page of their own on this site, which is where the searches for secure digital card recovery are answered properly, so this page is for everything else in the bag. CompactFlash is the one worth understanding because its commonest fault is not in the card at all: CF uses pins in the camera body rather than contacts, and a card pushed in at an angle bends those pins, after which every card tried in that body appears faulty. Before condemning a CF card, try it in a reader. XQD and CFexpress carry an interface built for continuous video and they run hot doing it, so their failures tend to be controller failures rather than worn memory, and a card that vanishes mid-take usually still holds the take. Sony Memory Stick media turns up from older camcorders and is read here on the same terms. What all of them share is that the memory is one component and the controller in front of it is another, and it is nearly always the second one that stops. Reaching past a dead controller means addressing the memory directly and working out the arrangement it was using, which is bench work rather than anything a reader can do.
A folder of stills is a straightforward job, because each image is small, self-contained and easy to recognise by its own header when the index has gone. Video is not like that. A long clip is written in fragments spread across the card, and the map tying those fragments into one file is stored at the end of the recording rather than the start. Interrupt it — a flat battery, a card pulled early, a body that overheats — and what is left is a large quantity of perfectly good picture with no structure over it. The camera then reports a zero-length file, or nothing at all, and every consumer utility agrees with the camera. Rebuilding it means reading the raw stream, identifying the frame boundaries and writing a fresh index over the top so an ordinary player will open it. That work is why a card of unreadable clips is worth sending rather than reformatting. Dash cams add a second problem on top: loop recording replaces the oldest clip once the card fills, and on a small card that can come round in hours. If the footage matters, take the card out of the camera today and put a spare one in.
One card is £250 + VAT whatever the capacity, the format or the badge, and the same figure covers a pen drive. The examination that comes first is free and closes two working days after the card is booked in, and one fixed figure follows it in writing. Deleted, formatted and corrupted cards are logical work under no fix, no fee. Where a card is built as a single moulded block with the controller and the memory sealed together, which is most microSD media, there is nothing to unsolder and the route in is through test points inside the package. That is chip-level work: half up front, outside the guarantee, and stated before you commit rather than discovered afterwards. Two other limits belong here. A card snapped clean through the memory itself gives nothing back, however carefully it is handled. And a card that has been recorded over is not damaged but overwritten, which is a different situation with a different answer. The free examination separates those from the recoverable majority at no cost to you.
A memory card is a controller and a flash assembly and very little else, so the entire job is reading those two things without letting anything write back. This is a small bench next to the disk side of the building and a busy one, because cards carry more that cannot be taken again than anything else that arrives here.
Full-size secure digital, microSD, CompactFlash, CFexpress Type A and Type B, XQD, Memory Stick and SmartMedia, each read through a blocker. A surprising number of cards declared dead at home turn out to be perfectly readable once they meet a reader that is not a worn slot in a five-year-old laptop.
Cards use the same families of flash controllers as pen drives, and most of those have a production diagnostic path. Restoring a collapsed translation table through it returns the card to a readable state with the mapping intact, which is a far better outcome than reconstructing the mapping from raw pages afterwards.
For the sealed single-block cards, the package is ground down under magnification until the test points are exposed and then wired onto individually. It is slow, uncertain work with a real success rate, and it is the only route into a card that has no separate memory package to remove.
Where the file system has gone entirely, images and video are recovered by recognising their own internal structure: JPEG and camera raw headers, MOV and MP4 atoms, AVCHD streams, the container formats used by dashcams and drones. That returns the pictures without their original names or folders, which is a trade nearly everybody accepts.
Worn pads, corrosion and bent CompactFlash pins dealt with properly before any attempt to read. Repeatedly forcing a marginal contact is one of the most reliable ways of converting an intermittent card into a permanent failure, and it is what most cards have already had done to them by the time they arrive.
Long recordings that stop partway through, clips that report zero length, and files that play in one program and not another. The content is generally complete and the map describing it is not, and rebuilding that map is a separate craft from recovering the card in the first place.
One figure covers every card in that list: 250 pounds + VAT, at any capacity, in any format, which is what a pen drive costs as well. Looking at it first is free and the answer comes back on the second working day after it is logged in. Deletions, formats and broken file systems are logical faults and no fix, no fee covers them. Grinding into a sealed microSD to reach its contacts is chip-level work, which appears in the published exclusions and wants half the money in advance, and which of those two a card falls into is settled before anybody asks you for a decision. More card jobs are spoiled by two habits than by every hardware fault put together. The first is sliding the card back into the camera after a deletion to check. The second is aiming a repair utility at the card while it writes its own scratch files onto it. Where one of those has already happened, put it on the booking form; it alters the order the bench works in and it does not end the job. Post the card in its plastic case, or taped between two pieces of stiff card, inside something padded. The camera, the drone and the dashcam stay where they are.
Almost everything worked on here arrived in the post. A drive that is already in trouble has an easier time boxed, padded and insured than it does being carried round in a bag for an afternoon, and a parcel handed over in Coventry today is normally booked in at Oxford tomorrow morning.
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.
The card page proper: SD, microSD, CompactFlash, XQD and the rest
A fresh index laid over a full card changes remarkably little
No moving parts to break, and a controller that stops answering anyway
A term of coursework, or a month of invoices, on one moulded stub
Wiped in the camera on Saturday, and what Sunday's booking did to it
Looking at it costs nothing, one written figure follows, and the band governing this page is £250 + VAT on a memory card, a pen drive or a USB stick.