Phones, tablets and memory cards
Phone data recovery, with the limits stated up front.
Most phone jobs are one of three things: the phone works but the files are gone, the phone is dead but the storage is intact, or the storage itself has failed. They need completely different work, and only one of them is quick.
Android
This is the deep end of what we do, and where a general repair shop stops. Android storage is encrypted per file against keys tied to your lock credential, so recovering data from a handset that won’t start is a key problem before it is ever a storage problem. We work at that level: recovering file-based encryption keys, reading storage directly through the chipset’s own low-level modes when the phone will not boot normally, and reassembling app data including messaging archives that are encrypted separately again.
Adopted SD cards, Secure Folder, and second profiles all store data in ways an ordinary file-copy will never see. So do the app backups that live on the phone rather than in the cloud.
What decides it: whether the storage chip is readable and whether the key material survives. If both hold, the odds are good even when the phone appears completely dead.
iPhone and iPad
We are deliberately narrower here, and you should be suspicious of anyone who isn’t. Modern iPhones encrypt storage against keys fused into the processor. If the logic board is dead, the keys are gone, and the data is gone with them. No laboratory recovers that, at any price.
What we do recover: data from a phone that still powers on but behaves badly, encrypted iTunes and Finder backups on a computer including forgotten-password cases, iCloud-synced content, and photos or messages deleted on a working device where the storage has not yet reused the space.
What decides it: whether the phone still runs, or whether a backup exists somewhere. If the answer to both is no, we will tell you that on the phone in minutes rather than take the job.
Memory cards, and what is different about them
A card that asks to be formatted usually still holds everything. The filesystem is what broke. Where the filesystem is unreadable we identify files by their contents instead, which finds photos and video a directory-based scan reports as absent. Interrupted video often lacks the index that tells a player where the frames are, so the stream gets parsed and the index rebuilt from the footage itself.
What we don’t do
We work on the data, not the handset. Getting your files off a phone and making that phone usable again are different jobs with different goals. What we do here is the first one, and we will tell you plainly when what you actually need is the second.
We don’t bypass anyone’s security. Work on a phone requires proof that it is yours, or an instructing solicitor’s engagement. We turn away requests to get into somebody else’s device, and we don’t discuss how it might be done.
We don’t promise dead iPhones. See above. It is the single most common thing customers are told by people who should know better.
Evidence and legal matters
Where phone content is evidence in a family, employment or criminal matter, the work changes: acquisition is documented, hashes are recorded at the point of acquisition, custody is logged from the moment the device arrives, and the report explains method and findings in language a court can follow. Authority to examine is settled before anything is touched.