Wedding photos gone mid-shoot, a card the camera abruptly wants to format, a microSD snapped clean in two — we bring photos and video back from memory cards for photographers and families throughout Staines and the surrounding Surrey towns.
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 free diagnostic page.
Every memory card job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these twelve cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
Reader, camera and PC all shrug — controller failure or corrupted firmware inside the card.
The file system index broke; the photos underneath are usually intact. Never press format.
Recoverable until new shots overwrite the space — stop using the card immediately.
In-camera formats are usually quick formats; most of the previous contents survive underneath.
MicroSDs snap in adapters and slots; monolith reconstruction reads the surviving internals directly.
A 64GB card showing 30MB means the controller has failed into a default mode — chip-level job.
A failing controller locks itself read-only; the lock slider on SD cards causes the same symptom.
Washing-machine survivors and cracked cards — cleaned, repaired and read at chip level.
Marked 512GB, really 16GB inside — files 'vanish' when writes wrap. We recover what was genuinely written.
Pulling the card mid-copy tears the file table; the files are re-carved from a sector image.
SanDisk SD and microSD cards commonly fail with a dead or read-only controller while the NAND behind it survives intact.
Heavily-used Lexar and Sony professional cards wear their cells and start returning corrupt frames under 4K and burst shooting.
Memory cards cram NAND flash into a tiny shell with almost no protection, so corruption and physical damage are everyday failures — especially on cards that have spent years in cameras, dashcams and drones. We work with SD, SDHC, SDXC, microSD, CompactFlash, XQD and CFexpress cards, always from a forensic image of the card so nothing we do can make the situation worse.
A snapped microSD or an electrically dead card calls for chip-level work: the memory is read directly and the raw data pieced back into your files. Monolith cards — where the whole card is a single sealed chip — are the toughest jobs in flash recovery, and the outcome hinges on the damage. The free diagnostic tells you exactly where you stand before you spend a penny.
Card recovery is flash-memory surgery, done with the same kit the batch of sticks and monoliths gets:
Reads NAND memory directly and rebuilds the controller's logic in software — the route in when a stick or card is dead.
Hot-air and infrared rework tools for lifting NAND chips from dead boards without cooking the data inside them.
Fine-pitch probe adapters and a pinout library for one-piece (monolith) cards and sticks where there's no chip to remove.
XOR, ECC and wear-levelling analysis that turns raw NAND dumps back into your actual files and folders.
Connector re-work and trace repair for snapped sticks and cracked boards — often the whole fix for physical damage.
Card and USB imaging goes through write-blocked readers, so the original media is never altered.
SD, SDHC, SDXC, microSD, CompactFlash, XQD and CFexpress — from dashcams and drones to professional camera bodies. SanDisk cards most often fail with a dead or read-only controller while the NAND survives; Lexar and Sony pro cards wear cells and drop frames under heavy 4K and burst shooting; and cheap or counterfeit microSDs corrupt or 'lose' capacity as soon as writes wrap around.
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 Guildford 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.