Read this before you do anything else
Don't power it on to see if it survived. That test is the risk.
There are no platters or heads in this one, so a drop does not cause the mechanical crash it would on a hard drive, and the honest news is that the odds here are much better. What a drop does damage is the connector, the solder joints holding the memory to the board, or the controller. That matters for what you do next: repeatedly plugging in a device with a cracked joint can shift a marginal connection to a dead one, and a controller that browns out mid-write can corrupt the mapping tables that say where your files physically live. Try it once. If it does not mount, stop there rather than working the connector.
Emergency
Dropped phone
If your phone has been dropped, the most useful thing on this page is above this paragraph, and it is free. What follows is what the fault usually turns out to be, how recoverable this class of failure is, and what it would cost, including the cases we would tell you to take elsewhere.
What this usually turns out to be
In a dropped phone the storage is usually the last thing to be damaged. It is soldered flat to the board in the middle of the device, with no moving parts, and it survives impacts that comprehensively destroy the screen, the frame and the camera glass. That means the data is very often completely intact behind a phone that looks destroyed. The real obstacle is access: the storage is encrypted against the passcode, and the passcode is normally entered on the screen that just broke.
Storage is soldered to the board and encrypted by default. That makes the passcode half of every phone recovery, and a factory reset instantly permanent.
Nothing at allbetter news
With no moving parts there is nothing inside to knock out of alignment. A dropped flash device very often survives a fall that would have killed a hard drive outright.
Controller or memory-package damage
The board flexed or the memory package took the impact. Less common than connector damage, and the harder of the two, but the storage itself is often still readable directly.
Cracked solder joint or connector damagebetter news
Common on USB sticks and phones, where the impact is taken by the connector rather than any storage. The memory itself is usually intact.
What to check first on a phone
- Check whether the phone still powers on and reaches the lock screen, even if the display is cracked.
- If the screen is dead but the phone responds, check whether it will still connect to a computer or a screen adapter, since a working phone with a broken display is a straightforward job.
- Confirm what is already synced to iCloud or Google, which frequently covers photographs and messages without touching the handset.
What not to do
Do not reset the phone or restore it as new to get it working again, and do not guess at the passcode repeatedly. Both paths end at the encryption keys being discarded, and at that point the intact memory behind the broken screen becomes permanently unreadable.
How recoverable this is
Governed almost entirely by one question: was it running when it fell? A parked, powered-off drive dropped a short distance frequently survives with nothing wrong at all. A drive dropped while spinning is the harder case, and it gets harder every time it is powered on afterwards. Flash devices and phones fare much better: with no moving parts, a drop usually damages the connector or the board rather than the storage.
What moves it, for your device specifically:
- How many times it has been powered on since
- Whether the damage is confined to the connector or reaches the memory behind it
- Whether the phone still boots far enough to be unlocked, because the storage is encrypted against the passcode
We will not give you a percentage for your device, and you should be wary of anyone who does. Nobody can know what is recoverable until the media has been imaged and read. What is above describes this class of failure; your drive gets its own answer after an assessment, in writing, at no cost.
What it costs
from $249
USB sticks and memory cards
Cameras, dashcams, drones, phones. Includes carving for cards that no longer present a filesystem.
What moves a job within its band: capacity, how much of the media is unstable, whether the filesystem is encrypted, and how much of the drive has to be read before the files you need are reachable. You get one fixed figure after the assessment and it does not move afterwards. If we can’t recover what matters to you, there is no recovery fee.
Next step
Tell us what failed.
Free assessment. Fixed quote before recovery starts. No recovery, no fee. Sydney drop-off or Australia-wide by tracked post.