One minute the card holds a christening, a wedding or a whole Cotswold shoot; the next, the camera wants to format it. Photographers from Cirencester, dashcam owners from Swindon and families from Highworth send us their SD, microSD and CF cards, and the pictures usually make the return trip.
Free diagnostic on every job involving a memory card. One fixed quote, in writing, before any work begins.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Electronic and mechanical failures and chip-level work are 50% upfront, with the balance only if we recover your data, while BitLocker, ransomware, DVR and forensic jobs are paid upfront once you accept the fixed quote. You'll find full pricing on the data recovery cost page.
Every memory card job starts by matching symptoms to faults, and these twenty cover almost everything that comes across the bench.
The camera, reader and PC all shrug: the controller or firmware has died, but your photos are still sitting inside.
It's the file table that broke, not your pictures, and agreeing to the format is the one move that makes things worse.
Frames stay in the flash until new shots land on them, so park the card and most will come back home.
In-camera formats are quick formats; the previous shoot generally survives intact and carves out.
Cards crease in slots and adapters; if the fracture spared the internal tracks, direct probing can read them.
A 128GB card announcing 30MB has crashed into its controller's fallback state, so it's chip-level work from here.
A failing controller can lock itself read-only; a slipped SD lock slider will fake the same complaint.
Washing machines, car parks and jacket pockets: cards are cleaned, stabilised and read at chip level.
Fake cards wrap writes over a tiny real chip once it fills; whatever genuinely landed is recoverable.
Pulling a card out mid-copy tears its file table, so the pictures are carved out of a raw capture instead.
Years of circular writing wear the flash out somewhere mid-loop, and the surviving blocks give up their footage to carving.
Ultra and Extreme cards die controller-first over perfectly healthy NAND, more than any other pattern we record.
A single sealed die with nothing to desolder, reached by mapping the test points and probing the memory directly.
Pro-camera cards fail hard at 4K and 8K bit-rates; their PCIe internals are worked on at the NVMe side of the bench.
Cards from crashed drones arrive creased, cracked and caught mid-write: physical damage on top of a logical mess, dealt with in that order.
SanDisk's Extreme microSD spends summers sealed inside camera housings, and the heat plus vibration ages it until read errors appear.
Kingston's SDCS2 range freezes in an unresponsive controller state; the NAND behind it reads cleanly once the controller is bypassed.
A CF card forced in at an angle bends the reader pins and shorts the interface, so the card is read on a repaired socket rig.
Counterfeit Samsung MB-MC 'EVO Plus' cards corrupt once their real flash wraps, and the genuine frames are carved from the honest region.
Professional 1066x cards can stall during long continuous bursts and corrupt the end of a shoot, which is then rebuilt from the raw image.
A memory card is bare NAND and a tiny controller in a plastic wafer, with no shock protection, no redundancy and nothing spare. SD and microSD in every speed class, CompactFlash from older bodies, XQD and CFexpress from current pro cameras: every one is imaged in full before any recovery step is taken, so the original never takes a second knock. That first forensic copy is why a botched DIY attempt elsewhere can often still be rescued here.
Physical casualties go to the chip-level side of the bench. A microSD is a monolith, one sealed sliver of silicon, so the way in is to map its test points and probe the memory directly, then untangle the raw dump back into JPEGs, RAW frames and video. Whether the internal tracks survived the snap decides everything, and that is exactly what the free assessment establishes before you commit a penny.
Card work is microsurgery on bare flash, and it shares the dedicated bench with sticks and monoliths:
This reads the raw NAND directly and rebuilds the dead controller's logic in software, which is how we get into sticks and cards that no longer respond at all.
A hot air station and an infrared heater used together, set up so we can lift memory chips off ruined boards at temperatures low enough that the stored charge survives.
We have a collection of needle-fine probe rigs and a library of pinouts for one-piece cards and sticks, where there is no separate chip to remove.
All of the XOR masking, error correction coding (ECC) and wear levelling are unpicked at the software level, until a raw image dump becomes folders with their proper names once again.
Repairing torn pads, broken tracks and sheared connectors under magnification is very often the complete solution when a stick has snapped.
The process of imaging data from both cards and sticks is done through a write-blocked reader, so the original flash stays exactly as it arrived.
Most of what gets sent to us is from the SanDisk Ultra SDSQUNR or SanDisk Extreme SDSQXAV families. Most of these cards come in because the controller failed or locked itself read-only while the NAND was still good. Dashcams deserve a special warning, as a microSD looping recordings for two or three years simply runs out of write life, and the footage then has to be carved from whichever blocks survived. Counterfeit microSDs bought from marketplace sites, including fake EVO Plus and 'high-capacity' microSDs, make up another large part of what we see. These fakes corrupt as soon as writes wrap around past their real flash.
Most customers get a quote first, by phone or with the free online diagnostic, and then post or courier their media to us.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive (from a server, every disk, each labelled with its bay), as we don't offer a drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (for example T2 and Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops), only drives that can be removed and sent to us. If you're not sure which kind you have, ring us first.
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Mark the package for the attention of Oxford Data Recovery and we'll ring you as soon as we've diagnosed your media.
Not sure what to send? Ring 0800 689 0668 first or use the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start now or call the freephone.