Devices · cards taken from cameras
A card is a £250 + VAT job, and the first look costs nothing. If a card appears blank, will not unlock, or has just gone dark, the pictures will nearly always be recoverable, unless someone has reformatted it in the meantime. No other device fails as regularly, and cards have an uncanny knack for choosing when to die: day four of a fortnight away, or the exact moment you were copying them somewhere safer. Around Reading they come from the freelance camera and edit crews working near the Shinfield studios, from photographers covering the fixtures at Newbury racecourse, from a Hungerford antiques dealer whose listings depend on the photographs, and from people returning home after holidays.
An engineer answers, and looking is free
0800 6890668
| What you are seeing | What is likely wrong | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| Canon: Memory card error; on other cameras, Cannot access the memory card | The camera can’t read the file system off the card | Remove the card and don’t go any further with it |
| Canon DSLR: Reinsert/change the card, after Card cannot be accessed | Dust or dirt on the contacts, or a controller that is going bad | Turn down the format prompt |
| Nikon: Card may be damaged, and a request to insert another card | Your card is damaged, or nothing is being recognised at all | Don't format it in the camera body |
| Card locked / Card is write-protected | The little tab on the edge of the card, or a controller that has shut itself | Has the lock switch on the card already been moved up? If so, the problem lies within the card |
| Windows asks you to format the device before it can open it | The volume appears as RAW while the files are intact on the card | Decline every offer it makes |
| No memory card, reported while one is sitting in the slot | Either the controller has failed or the pads on the card have | Chip-level work from this point on |
A case number is assigned to your device when we receive it. An engineer then finds the real fault (free) before anything else occurs; you will be advised clearly of what will be returned and what will not, along with a single written price. Charges cannot begin until you have read this and accepted.
Nothing is ever attempted on your card. An exact byte-for-byte clone of it is made first; the original then goes into a protective sleeve and stays there, and everything else is done against the copy.
The repair is performed against the image. Rebuild the file tables and your folder names travel back with your photos. Where very little of the index survives, each file is identified instead by the first bytes it opens with and extracted individually. RAW files are treated the same as JPEG files at that stage.
Counting files tells you nothing worth knowing. Every recovered image is opened one by one, and each has to render fully at the size the camera recorded it.
You look at the file list first and make a decision about what to do. We will never invoice anything until you have said yes, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. All of the information that we recover will be put on new media purchased by us specifically for this job, and our company pays the cost of postage back to you. The case stays open on the bench until you tell us the files open on your own machine.
A figure nobody actually holds: there is no dependable number for how many fake cards are circulating. Manufacturers and labs agree that the issue is widespread, we see plenty of them, and every percentage that appears in print began as someone’s estimate. The exact number doesn't matter anyway: once data exceeds the genuine capacity of a counterfeit card, it is not sitting somewhere waiting for a lab to discover.
Every frame came back from a 512GB SanDisk that had shown as empty at breakfast. No attempts were made on the card itself: a copy of it was made and all the work done there. First the file system was put back into order; then a deep carve went after the images that no longer had an entry pointing to them. The photographer kept the client.
Don't. The format creates an entirely new index right on top of the entries holding your folder names, your file names and your dates, so all you're left with is a numbered heap. Leave the card alone, and much more of the original structure will come back to you along with the images.
Yes, RAW too. Carving keys on the signature bytes at the start of a file. RAF, DNG, ARW, NEF and CR3 each open with such a marker, and the video wrappers are built on the same principle. Much of the work on this bench comes from photographers and filmmakers who do it for a living.
Often not. Everything on a modern card resides on a single die, so what's important is whether the crack goes across that die. Miss it and the pads can still be accessed directly. Either way the card has to be scrapped; the pictures are the point.
Cards move faster than anything else here: we usually get them back within 2–3 working days, much sooner when there is a deadline. Simply tell us the date you need them by, and we will schedule the work backwards from that.
There is no charge for the look. You then receive a list of the files that opened, those that did not, and a fixed amount to complete the job. Keep it switched off until you have received that in writing.