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 memory card job. One fixed quote in writing before any work begins.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
Every memory card job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these twenty cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
Camera, reader and PC all shrug — controller or firmware death, with the photos still sitting inside.
The file table broke, not your pictures; agreeing to the format is the one move that makes it worse.
The frames stay in the flash until new shots land on them — park the card and most come home.
In-camera formats are quick formats; the shoot before them generally survives intact and carves out.
Cards crease in slots and adapters; if the fracture spared the internal tracks, direct probing reads them.
A 128GB card announcing 30MB has crashed into its controller's fallback state — chip-level work from here.
A failing controller can lock itself read-only; a slipped SD lock slider fakes the same complaint.
Washing machines, car parks and jacket pockets — 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 mid-copy tears its file table; the pictures get carved out of a raw capture instead.
Years of circular writing wears the flash out mid-loop — the surviving blocks give up their footage to carving.
Ultra and Extreme cards die controller-first over perfectly healthy NAND more than any pattern we record.
A single sealed die with nothing to desolder — reached by mapping test points and probing the memory directly.
Pro-camera cards fail hard at 4K and 8K bit-rates; their PCIe internals are worked on the NVMe side of the bench.
Cards from downed drones arrive creased, cracked and mid-write — physical damage stacked on logical mess, handled in order.
SanDisk's Extreme microSD spends summers in sealed camera housings; heat plus vibration ages it into read errors.
Kingston's SDCS2 range freezes into an unresponsive controller state; the NAND behind it reads cleanly once bypassed.
A CF card forced in askew bends reader pins and shorts the interface — the card is read on a repaired socket rig.
Counterfeit Samsung MB-MC 'EVO Plus' cards corrupt once their real flash wraps — genuine frames are carved from the honest region.
Professional 1066x cards can stall during long continuous bursts, corrupting the tail of a shoot — rebuilt from the raw image.
A memory card is bare NAND and a tiny controller in a plastic wafer — no shock protection, no redundancy, nothing spare. SD and microSD in every speed class, CompactFlash from older bodies, XQD and CFexpress from current pro cameras: each one is imaged completely before any recovery move is made, so the original never absorbs a second insult. That first forensic copy is the reason a botched DIY attempt elsewhere is often still rescuable here.
Physical casualties go to the chip-level side of the bench. A microSD is a monolith — one sealed sliver of silicon — so the route in is mapping its test points and probing the memory directly, then untangling the raw dump back into JPEGs, RAW frames and video. Whether the internal tracks survived the snap decides everything, and that's 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:
Reads raw NAND directly and re-implements the dead controller's logic in software — the route into sticks and cards that no longer answer at all.
Hot-air and infrared rework tuned to lift memory packages from ruined boards at temperatures the stored charge survives.
Needle-fine probe rigs and a pinout archive for one-piece cards and sticks where there is no separate chip to remove.
XOR masks, ECC and wear-levelling unpicked in software until a raw dump turns back into folders with their proper names.
Torn pads, cracked tracks and sheared connectors rebuilt under magnification — often the entire cure for a snapped stick.
Card and stick imaging runs through blocked readers, so the original flash stays exactly as it arrived.
The SanDisk Ultra SDSQUNR and Extreme SDSQXAV families dominate the intake, usually via a controller that died or locked read-only while the NAND stayed healthy. Dashcam wear-out deserves its own warning: a microSD looping recordings for two or three years simply runs out of write life, and the footage has to be carved from whichever blocks survived. Marketplace counterfeits — fake EVO Plus and 'high-capacity' microSDs alike — are the other regular, corrupting the moment writes wrap their real flash.
Most customers 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 — we don't provide an internal drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops) — only drives that can be removed and sent to us.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Oxford Data Recovery and we'll call you as soon as we diagnose your media.
Not sure what to send? Call 0800 689 0668 first or use the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, no fix no fee — start now or call the freephone.