Bench work · memory cards and cameras
Delete a folder and only its index entry goes. Format in the camera and a blank index goes down over the old one. A card the body will not read is often fine on a bench. In every case the frames stay exactly where they are until fresh data lands on top. This page covers what a free download actually finishes, why a 50MB RAW arrives weighing 5MB, and how a frame is rebuilt whole. Cards, external drives and computers, from Hull and the East Riding. Phones we do not take.
An engineer will take the details
0800 6890668
| What you see | What the fault is | What to try |
|---|---|---|
| You deleted the wrong folder | Only the index entry is cleared. The picture is left where it was and stays readable until new data lands on it | Take it out and put it away |
| The card was formatted in-camera | An empty index is laid over the old one. The frames below it are normally still whole | Good odds, provided you stopped taking pictures |
| ‘Memory card error’, with a prompt to format | The index is corrupt. What sits underneath it is usually undamaged | Turn down the format offer, every time it appears |
| Files came back and none of them open | What you have is screen JPEGs, or the first fragment of each frame | The whole frames are almost certainly still there |
| Bands of colour across a RAW, or grey lower down | The frame went down in separate runs, or some of it has been overwritten | Reassembled to the maker’s own spec |
| Video that refuses to play | A 4K clip is broken up far more than a still | Joined back up on the right frame boundaries |
Each item that arrives gets a case number the day it lands. An engineer looks at it and finds the real fault, and that costs you nothing. You are told in plain terms which files can come off the drive and which cannot. A price follows — one figure, written down. No work starts until you have seen it and agreed to it.
We take a sector-by-sector image of the card before anything else. All the work happens on that copy. The card itself is read the once and never altered.
If the table can be repaired, everything returns as you had it: your file names, your folder structure, the original dates. If it cannot, we carve. Each format is read to its own specification and a full RAW frame is built back out of the runs it was scattered into. A thumbnail is not a result.
No job goes back until every recovered frame has been opened at 100% on a monitor and checked. A figure in a report proves nothing. Seeing the picture at full size on screen does.
You are not billed while you are still thinking. The list of what came off the drive goes to you first, and the invoice waits on your word. Files go home on media bought in for the job, with the postage back on us. We keep the job open until you have opened them on your own machine.
What decides a photo job is usually this: how much use the card got afterwards. Put it away the moment you notice and you are in a strong position. Carry on shooting and every fresh exposure has to be written somewhere — often over the frames you are trying to get back. It costs nothing to stop.
What the free tool produced were previews: six hundred of them, and none big enough to print. The card had sat unused since the wedding, so the copy came off it without trouble. Each CR3 was then assembled from the pieces it had been broken into. All 640 came back at their proper size.
On a small JPEG, from a card you put away at once, often enough. RAW and video are a different matter. These tools count anything they find, and the screen preview inside a frame counts too. So the tally reads well and the folder is full of offcuts. Image the card first. Then decide what a real file ought to weigh, before you look at the numbers.
Two causes cover nearly all of it. Either the tool lifted the small screen JPEG out of the RAW and left the rest, or it took only the first chunk of a frame that had gone down in more than one place on the card. Either way, the sensor data has usually gone nowhere. Read to the maker’s own layout, the frame comes back — unless something has been written over that ground since.
Usually not. All the camera does is put an empty file system down on top; underneath, the pictures are where they always were. Put the card away now and the odds are good. Every shot you take after this eats into them.
No. Phones and tablets are not work the lab takes, and we make no exceptions. If the pictures were ever copied onto a card, an external drive or a computer, post that and we will start on it. Hang on to the handset. Better you hear this now than after you have posted it.
Leave it switched off. A failing drive has a limited number of starts in it, and each one spends a little more. The free diagnosis will say which files can be read.