Emergency
Dropped phone
If your phone was dropped it, 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
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.
Head assembly displaced or damaged
The likeliest serious outcome when a drive is dropped while running. Powering on afterwards is what turns it into surface damage.
Platter damage from head contact at impact
Where the heads struck the surface during the fall, leaving scoring already present before any power-up.
Nothing at allbetter news
Drives are designed to survive substantial shock while parked and idle. A drop onto carpet while switched off very often does no damage whatsoever.
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.
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:
- Whether the device was powered on and spinning at the moment of impact
- How many times it has been powered on since
- Whether the impact displaced the heads or damaged the platter surface
- For flash devices, whether the damage is confined to the connector or reaches the memory
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.
Not quite your situation?
Pick the device and what it is doing, and this gives you the same answer for that combination instead.