Bench work · camera cards, sticks and photo drives
£250 + VAT is the starting price for cards and USB sticks, quoted in writing after a free look, and most jobs are completed within two to three working days. Before that, though: do not use the card again. Deleting a folder removes only the index entry and leaves all the data there. An in-camera format writes a brand new empty index over the original. A card the camera claims is dead is very often fine when tested on a bench. All three leave your images sitting right where they were written until something else lands on top of them. Below: what you actually get with a free download, why a 50MB RAW file comes home at a tenth of its true size, and how a frame is rebuilt whole. Cards, sticks, external drives and drives removed from computers, for Reading, Caversham, Earley and Tilehurst. No phones.
An engineer answers, and looking is free
0800 6890668
| What you are seeing | What is likely wrong | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| You erased the wrong folder | The index entry goes, but the picture remains where it is and stays readable until something is written directly over it | Eject the card and set it aside |
| The camera formatted it for you | An empty index is placed over the original, and generally everything below it is intact | As long as you've stopped taking photos, your chances are good |
| A 'Memory card error' message, and an offer to format the card | Your index is corrupted. Generally the pictures under it are unharmed | Refuse the offer, every time it appears |
| Files were recovered, but none of them opens | What you have are screen previews, or only the beginning of each frame | Generally the full frames are still intact |
| Bands of colour through a RAW, or grey bars along the bottom | Either the frame was written in separate runs, or parts of it were written over | Rebuilt to the maker's own layout |
| A clip that will not play | 4K video fragments across a card much more than a still frame ever will | Rejoined on the right frame boundaries |
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.
Your card is cloned sector by sector before anything else happens. Afterwards each step that follows runs against the clone. You get the original back exactly as it arrived.
Where the table can be repaired, everything is restored to its original state (names, folder structure, and the dates the camera stamped on every frame). Where this isn't possible, carving takes place. Each format is read against its maker's published specification, and a complete RAW frame is rebuilt from the runs it had been scattered across. A preview is not an end product.
A job cannot leave without every frame that came back being opened at 100% on a screen and reviewed. No one should treat a count in a report as evidence. The full-size picture is the evidence.
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.
Whether a photo job succeeds depends on how the card was treated afterwards: shelve it right away when you realise something went wrong and the odds are on your side. Continue shooting, and each new exposure has to be recorded somewhere, most of the time directly over the frames you want back. Stopping never costs anything, the look never costs anything, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data.
Six hundred thumbnails was all the free utility had managed and not one of them would print. No new frames had landed on the card after the wedding, so the copy came off cleanly. Then each CR3 was reassembled from its scattered fragments, and all 640 returned at full size.
On a small JPEG from a card that was put away immediately, often yes. On RAW files and on video, no. This type of program counts every item it finds, and because a frame has a preview inside it, the preview is counted as a file, so the total looks substantial while your folder quietly fills with offcuts. Make a copy of the card first. Next decide how much a real file should weigh. Then check the totals again.
Two explanations account for almost all of it. Either the program read the little preview out of your RAW file but left the frame it sits in behind, or it took only the beginning of an image that had been written in several runs. In either case most of the sensor data should still exist. Read the frame as its maker documented it and it will become complete again, so long as nothing else has been written into the space it was using since.
Usually not. A format creates an empty directory over the old one and goes no further than that; your pictures are still where they were laid down. Shelve the card now and the odds are strongly with you. Every frame you take from this point on eats into them.
No. Phones and tablets fall outside what this lab does, and there are no exceptions. However, if your photos were copied off the phone or tablet to somewhere else (a memory card, an external drive, the drive out of a laptop, the folder of HEIC files that lands on a computer the first time anybody runs a backup), we can work on that. Please get a quote first, by phone or with our form, then post that and we can start. Keep the handset; better to know now than after the parcel has gone.
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.