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 data recovery cost page.
Every memory card job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these twelve cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
When the camera, the reader and the PC all draw a blank, the card's controller or its firmware has failed internally.
That prompt means the index has broken while the photos beneath it survive — whatever you do, don't press format.
Until new shots land on the same space the old ones are still there — put the card down and stop shooting.
A format done in-camera is nearly always the quick kind, which leaves most of what was on the card sitting underneath.
Adapters and slots snap microSDs constantly; reading the surviving internals directly through monolith work gets them back.
A 64GB card announcing 30MB has dropped into its controller's fallback mode — that's a chip-level recovery.
Either the controller has locked itself down as it fails, or the little slider on an SD card is doing the same job.
Cards come back from washing machines and cracked shells more often than not — cleaned up, repaired and read at chip level.
The label says 512GB, the flash inside says 16GB — files 'disappear' once writes wrap around. What was genuinely stored, we recover.
Yanking a card mid-copy rips the file table; a full sector image is taken and your files carved back from it.
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.
Bringing a card back is surgery on flash memory, and it shares a bench with the sticks and monoliths:
Bypasses a dead controller entirely, reading the NAND memory itself and reconstructing the controller's logic in software — that's how a lifeless card or stick is reached.
Memory chips come off failed boards under precisely-controlled hot air and infrared heat, warm enough to release the solder, never enough to harm the data.
For sealed one-piece (monolith) cards and sticks with no chip to lift, hair-fine probes and a library of pinouts reach the memory in place.
Software that untangles XOR, ECC and wear-levelling, so a raw memory dump becomes your folders and files again.
Broken connectors and cracked tracks are rebuilt under magnification — with physical damage, that repair is often the entire recovery.
Every card and stick is read through a write-blocked reader, so the flash you sent stays exactly as it came.
Every format from a dashcam's microSD to a professional body's CFexpress passes through — SD, SDHC, SDXC, CompactFlash and XQD included. 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 their media to us tracked and insured.
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.