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 memory card
If your memory card 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
Memory cards are close to indestructible in a fall. They are a sealed block of epoxy with contacts on one face, no moving parts, and very little mass to generate force on impact. A dropped card is nearly always a perfectly good card, and when there is a real problem after a drop it is usually that the card was ejected mid-write, or that the slot or reader it was in took the damage instead. Bent or cracked cards do happen, but from being trodden on or forced into a slot rather than from falling.
Cards from cameras, dashcams and drones. When a card stops presenting a filesystem the files are often still there and reachable by carving for them directly.
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 memory card
- Inspect the card for any visible crack or bend, particularly around the contacts.
- Try it in a reader other than the device it was in, since a dropped camera or laptop may have a damaged slot while the card is fine.
- If it mounts, copy the contents off before using it again.
What not to do
Do not force it into a slot that now resists, and do not let the camera format it if it reads as unusable after the fall. If the card was ejected mid-write the filesystem may be inconsistent while every photograph remains present, and formatting is what turns that into an actual loss.
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 memory packages are still bonded to the board, since a cracked joint is repairable and a cracked die is not
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.
Other faults on a memory card
Dropped or knocked on other devices
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.