ADR / The hardware we handle / SD cards and camera media

Devices · camera memory cards

SD and memory card recovery, London. Nothing else holds a copy, and that day is not repeatable.

A card costs £250 + VAT, and the free look comes ahead of that. Cards go blank and display nothing, or fail to unlock; however, in nearly all cases the images can still be obtained from the card. The one case when images cannot be retrieved is if the owner has already reformatted their own card. Nothing else fails as frequently as a card, and nothing else times it as poorly: it could occur on the fourth day of a two-week holiday abroad, or immediately upon commencing to transfer the data to a safe storage location. Cards are submitted to our bench from all over London: photographers that shoot weddings and events throughout Ilford and Gants Hill, a gallery that recorded a work already sold and sent abroad, and families returning home after their holidays all submit cards to us.

Only pay if we recover your data, on most jobs A free look first, then one figure in writing Media posted in from Croydon, Ealing and Camden

Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0203 0868633

Memory card symptoms, and how long each gives you.

Not listed? Try the finder →

In it goes, and it asks to be formatted againThe index is gone, but usually the frames are not. Decline that prompt.Everyday job

Empty since a copy halted part-way throughIt is nothing worse than a damaged file table. Your frames are still exactly where your camera put them.Everyday job

Not a reader anywhere will list itGenerally the controller. Sealed cards get opened at the die.Everyday job

Pictures opening striped or corruptTired cells. Retire the card.Do not delay

Broken, or badly buckledIt appears far more damaged than it actually is: the die itself is generally fine.Everyday job

Packing it and posting it: get a quote first (by phone or with the form), then box it so nothing can move about. Send it tracked and insured to our Guildford intake lab, or drop it off there, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm (no appointment needed); the leg home is paid at this end. Want a word first about what goes into the box? Ring us before it is sealed and an engineer will run through it. You will find the lot spelled out on the guide to packing and posting.

Brand by brand, and what tends to go wrong.

SanDiskUltra, Extreme, Extreme Pro: in most camera bags, and more likely to be copied by fakers than any other range.

Integral and KingstonIntegral offers SD and microSD; Kingston offers Canvas React Plus and Canvas Select Plus.

Lexar, Sony and ProGradeType A and Type B CFexpress, Sony's TOUGH SD range, and Gold and Professional.

CFexpress plus XQDSealed and fast: Angelbird, Nikon, Sony. Once one goes dead, there is no way in but the bench.

What the camera's message actually means.

Describe yours to us →

What is going on	The usual reason for it	Where that leaves you
Canon: Memory card error, or elsewhere it reads Card cannot be accessed	The camera can't read the file system on this card	Just pull it out and leave it alone
Canon DSLR: after “Card cannot be accessed”, it then shows “Reinsert/change the card”	Either dirty contact points, or a dying controller	Decline the format prompt
Nikon: This card may be damaged, followed by a request to try using another	Damage to the card, or absolutely nothing recognised whatever	Never allow the camera to format it.
On screen: card locked, or card write-protected	Either the write-protect tab, or a controller that has closed itself down	Card failure, if the tab is already up.
Windows wants to offer you a format before it will even allow you access to this card	When the card is read by Windows as "RAW", each and every single frame is completely untouched.	Turn down the prompt, whatever it says.
It says “No memory card” when there is indeed one in the slot	Either the controller or the pads have failed	Chip level from here onwards

From the box arriving to your files going back.

Work we have closed →

Logged the day it lands, and the first look costs nothing Free

As soon as your parcel arrives here, an engineer assigns a case number that same day, prior to determining what has really failed, which is the first thing done and costs you nothing. In addition to a note of what can and cannot be recovered from your drive, you will receive at the same time the fixed, written price for restoring what can be recovered. You can accept this quote, or decline it, which will result in no further obligation on your part and nothing owed to us.

Nothing to pay for lookingA single figure, put in writingNothing owed at this stage

The card itself is never touched

Your actual card is never worked on. First, an exact copy (bit for bit) is created from it; the card is placed in a sleeve, and everything after that is done to the copy, not your actual card.

The clone comes before anything elseYour media is read, and only read

Tables repaired, or frames carved

Repairs take place directly on that image. Once the file tables are rebuilt, the names of folders return alongside their images; where too little of the index has survived, the files are identified by the bytes they open with and pulled out individually. RAW files are treated identically to JPEGs by then.

Recognised from their headersRAW along with JPEG

Nothing goes out unchecked

File counts mean nothing by themselves. Every single recovered image is opened and examined by hand, and each one must fully render at the size it was originally captured by the camera.

Every image opened by handWhole frames, not thumbnails

You see the file list before you pay

You will see what has been recovered as a list first, after which a bill exists. Accepting the list means that a bill will be issued. Rejecting the list means that a bill will not be issued, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. The recovered data travels from here back to you via new media purchased specifically for your project, with the cost of postage paid by us. Your case is not resolved (i.e., "closed") until you personally view the files on a computer of your own.

No charge until you accept the figureFresh media, supplied with the jobThe post home is ours

What arrives most often

There's one fault no laboratory can fix: a counterfeit memory card. The controller in the card reports a size that the memory behind it does not have. Any data written beyond the limit of real capacity will be acknowledged and then thrown away. Nothing was ever sent to the chip, so nothing can be recovered.
Do you think this card may be counterfeit? Fill the card with data, then verify every single byte which reads back. H2testw allows you to do this using Windows; F3 does the same thing on Mac and Linux. Verifying the label doesn't prove anything: the false capacity number exists in the registers the card responds from; therefore, the labelling (the printed capacity), the packaging, and the operating system all give you the same false information.
All modern cards are produced as one moulded piece, containing both a controller and a flash die together in a block of resin. Once a memory card fails to respond, technicians begin working on microscopic pads found on the surface of the die itself, and no card reader is involved in the recovery process.
A format mends nothing: all the camera does is write fresh tables across the records that carried the folder names, the order of the frames and their dates.

A figure nobody actually holds: there isn't a reliable count of how many counterfeit memory cards are in circulation. Both manufacturers and labs claim that counterfeiting has become widespread; we also see lots of them; and every confident percentage that has been printed started out as somebody's estimate. Even if we could know exactly how many counterfeit memory cards exist, it would change nothing: whatever was written beyond a counterfeit card's true capacity is not stored anywhere at all.

One job, followed all the way through.

LDN · ADR-2026-3329JOB LOGGED ✓

A wedding evening on one card, and nothing there by morning

A 512GB SanDisk that read as an empty device at breakfast; however, by the end of the job every single frame was accounted for. No information was ever written to the original card (a duplicate of the card's contents was made instead); therefore, all processing could take place against the duplicate. Much of the time spent was recovering the file structure (and reconstructing it), while a deep carve found the missing frames whose directory entries had disappeared. The photographer retained the client.

Every last frame recovered from the card48 hours at the bench

What helps, and what harms.

Do this much first

Take it out of the camera once, and then don't touch it again.
In a rigid protective case, or taped flat against a piece of stiff card
Tell us which camera it came from, and what was stored on it.
Record the exact words of the error message that tells you something went wrong.

What sets us back

Hopeful acceptance of the format request displayed by the camera.
Continuing to shoot photos after something goes wrong.
Using free utility software directly on the memory card itself.
Trying different card readers one by one.

Questions answered before you commit.

The camera is offering to format the card. Do I agree?

Do not format it. Formatting lays down a blank catalogue directly over the entries containing folder and file names and date/time stamps, and therefore anything recovered afterwards comes back as a jumbled mass of files with only numbers for names. If you do not attempt to reformat the memory card, the photos will come back with much more of their original order preserved.

Do RAW files come back too, or only JPEGs?

Yes, even RAW. Carving works from the signature each file opens with: RAF, DNG, ARW, NEF and CR3 files all have one, and video wrappers are built the same way. A lot of what we do here comes from professional photographers.

The card has broken in half. Are the pictures gone?

Mostly, no. Modern cards hold everything on one piece of silicon, therefore the issue is just whether the crack has gone through that chip. If it has not, then the contact pads are still accessible. The card itself is finished regardless; it is the pictures that matter.

How soon would a card come back?

Faster than anything else we handle. The majority of cards will be returned within two or three working days, and earlier than that if a deadline is coming up. Please provide us with the specific date you need to meet, and we will plan our schedule for completing the work back from that date.

Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.

Pen drives and USB sticks → Photos that are no longer there → Drives on USB or Thunderbolt → Begin with the symptom →

Nothing gets worse while the power is off.

It doesn't cost you anything for us to look at it. All we do is give you a breakdown of what opened and what did not, plus a single fixed price to complete, written down before you agree to let us continue. On most jobs, you only pay if we recover your data. Please don't turn on the drive until you get that breakdown.

0203 0868633

Get it assessed Sending it to Guildford

Drives, cards and entire machines

Whatever it is doing now

Footage, evidence and reports

What it costs, and what follows