One thing to know first
Not an emergency, but don't let anything try to fix it yet.
A device that is silent and cool is not degrading while it sits there, so there is no clock running on the hardware. The risk here is the next action rather than the passage of time: initialising the disk when prompted, letting a repair tool write a new partition table, or reformatting to make it usable will each overwrite the map to your files. Decline every offer to fix, repair or initialise until you know which fault you have.
Often fixable yourself
Memory card not showing up
A memory card in this state is very often something you can resolve yourself, at no cost, and this page tells you how before it tells you anything about us. Where that doesn't work, the rest explains what the fault usually is and what recovery involves.
What this usually turns out to be
More often than not the card is fine and the thing reading it is not. Card readers, especially the slots built into laptops and the cheapest USB readers, fail far more often than the cards themselves. There is also a purely mechanical possibility that catches a lot of people: full-size SD cards have a small write-protect switch on the left edge, and when that slides down the card will present as unwritable or fail to mount at all, with nothing whatsoever wrong with it.
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.
Cable, port or enclosure faultbetter news
The single commonest cause, and entirely benign. The device behind the failed connection is untouched.
Partition table or boot sector damagebetter news
The drive is healthy and the files are all present, but the index that points to them is corrupt, so the operating system sees unallocated space.
Filesystem the operating system doesn't recognisebetter news
A drive formatted on a Mac, a Linux box, or a NAS will often appear unreadable or empty on Windows while being perfectly intact.
Controller or translation-layer failure
On flash media, the controller that maps files onto the memory has failed. The memory is intact but nothing can reach it without specialist work.
Degrading or failing media
The device is present but cannot complete the reads needed to identify itself. This is the case where time and power do matter.
What to check first on a memory card
- Check the lock switch on the edge of the card and slide it fully up. On worn cards it moves on its own inside a camera bag.
- Try a different reader, and preferably a different type of reader. A card that fails in a laptop slot and works in a cheap USB reader is telling you the slot has failed.
- Try the card back in the device that wrote it, such as the camera or dashcam, and see whether that still reads it.
What not to do
Do not let the camera or the computer format the card to make it usable again. Cameras in particular offer this immediately and phrase it as a repair, and it is the single commonest way photographs are lost after a card fault that was otherwise entirely recoverable.
Try this before you pay anyone
Work through these before assuming the worst. Most cases end here
- Change the cable first. USB cables fail far more often than drives do, and a charge-only cable carries no data at all.
- Try every port, then a different computer. A drive that appears on another machine has a driver or port fault, not a data fault.
- Check whether the operating system can see the device even though the files aren't visible: Disk Management on Windows, Disk Utility on macOS, `lsblk` on Linux. A device listed there with no drive letter or mount point is intact and simply not mounted.
- If it is listed but shows as RAW or unallocated, stop and read the next line carefully.
If Windows offers to initialise the disk, or macOS offers to repair or erase it, say no every time. Those actions write to the very structures that describe where your files are. A drive showing as RAW usually still has everything on it, and that stays true only for as long as nothing writes to it.
How recoverable this is
The most optimistic group on this page taken as a whole. A large share are connection or filesystem faults where the data was never in danger, and a good number of those the reader resolves themselves in ten minutes at no cost. The cases that are genuinely media or controller failures are a different job, and the checks below separate them without risk.
What moves it, for your device specifically:
- Whether the device is detected at any level: BIOS, Disk Management, or not at all
- Whether anything has already written to it, including an initialise or a repair
- Whether the underlying media is healthy or degrading
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
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.