Devices · camera memory cards
A card is £250 + VAT, with the free look ahead of it. Cards go dark, show nothing, or refuse to unlock, and in almost every one of those the pictures still come off; the exception is a card already reformatted by its owner. Nothing else fails as often, and nothing times it as badly — day four of a fortnight abroad, or the very minute the copying to somewhere safer had begun. Cards reach the bench from across London: wedding and event photographers around Ilford and Gants Hill, from a gallery recording a work already sold and shipped abroad, and from families home off holiday.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0203 0868633
| What is going on | The usual reason for it | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| Canon: Memory card error — elsewhere, Card cannot be accessed | The camera cannot read the file system on it | Slide it out, and then let it be |
| Canon DSLR: after Card cannot be accessed, Reinsert/change the card | Dirty contacts, or a failing controller | Decline the format prompt |
| Nikon: This card may be damaged, then a request for a different one | Damage to the card, or nothing recognised whatever | Do not let the camera format it |
| On screen: card locked, or card write-protected | Either the write-protect tab, or a controller that has closed itself down | If the tab is already up, the fault is in the card |
| Windows offers a format before it will open it | Windows reads the volume as RAW, and every frame is untouched | Turn the prompt down, whatever it says |
| It says No memory card, with a card in the slot | Either the controller or the pads have failed | Chip level from here onwards |
A case number goes on it the day the parcel lands, and an engineer settles what has truly failed before anything else happens — free of charge, and first in the order of work. Back to you come two things together: a straight note of what is liftable and what is not, plus one figure, fixed and written down. Accept it, or decline and owe us nothing.
Your card itself is never worked on. A bit-for-bit clone is lifted from it first; the card goes into a sleeve, and everything after that happens to the clone.
The repair work happens on that image. Rebuild the file tables and folder names come home alongside the pictures; where too little index has survived, files get recognised by the bytes they open with and lifted out singly. RAW is handled exactly as JPEG is by then.
A file count is worth nothing on its own. Each recovered picture is opened by hand, and every one has to render whole, at the size the camera wrote it.
What was recovered is listed for you first, and only then does a bill exist. Approve the list and it is invoiced; turn it down and it is not — and where nothing has come back, most jobs carry no charge whatever. Recovered data travels home on fresh media bought in for your job, with the postage at our end. Your case is not closed until you have read those files on a machine of your own.
A figure nobody actually holds: no one has a dependable count of fake cards in circulation. Makers and laboratories alike call it widespread; we see plenty; and every confident percentage in print started out as somebody's estimate. Knowing the real number would change nothing anyway: whatever was written beyond a fake card's true capacity is not anywhere at all.
A 512GB SanDisk that read as empty at breakfast; by the close of the job every frame was accounted for. Nothing was ever written to the card — a clone was lifted from it, and everything after that ran on the copy. Most of the work was putting the file system back together, and a deep carve turned up the frames whose directory entries had gone. The photographer kept the client.
Don't. Formatting lays a clean index directly over the entries that hold names, folders and dates, and anything recovered afterwards comes back as an unnamed heap of numbers. Leave the card untouched and the pictures come back with much more of their original arrangement intact.
RAW as well. What carving works from is the signature each file opens with: RAF, DNG, ARW, NEF, CR3 all have one, and video wrappers are built the same way. Much of this bench's work comes in from people who photograph for a living.
Often not. A modern card keeps everything on a single die, so the question is simply whether the break went through it. If it did not, the pads remain within reach. The card itself is finished either way; the pictures are the point.
Faster than anything else here. Most cards are home again within two or three working days, and quicker still when a date is close. Tell us the day you must meet and the work is planned back from that.
Looking at it is free. Back comes a list of what opened and what did not, together with a single price to finish, set down in writing while you are still free to say no. On most jobs an invoice only follows the data. Until that list reaches you, leave the drive switched off.