Hands-on, device-by-device guidance on the right moves — and the wrong ones — from the moment storage begins to fail. Drawn from more than twenty-five years of in-house recovery, because that very first decision often settles whether your data returns at all.
More data is lost in the minutes after a failure than in the failure itself — simply by pressing on. The rules that follow hold for every device on this page.
No matter the device, these five steps safeguard both your data and the odds of getting all of it back. Run through them before attempting anything else.
Each new photo, saved file or opened program can write over data that's still salvageable. Set the device aside.
Clicking, beeping, or refusing to spin? Power it down immediately. Every restart of a failing drive can turn the damage permanent.
Point recovery or "repair" software at a physically failing drive and it keeps the disk spinning while pounding the weak spots — the usual result is a recoverable drive becoming an unrecoverable one.
Skip the freezer trick, leave the casing shut, and don't swap circuit boards. These old myths do real, frequently permanent harm.
Bring it in or send it to us by fully insured post. Before any billable work starts, we'll tell you precisely what can be recovered and what it will cost.
Choose whatever you're dealing with below for its warning signs, its dos and don'ts, and how recovery actually works on that media.
There are two quite distinct ways a spinning hard drive fails. Logical ones — deletion, formatting or corruption — leave the mechanism working and tend to be the safest to reverse. Physical ones — crashed heads, a seized motor, dead electronics — call for bench work, and a wrong first move can be fatal. Working out which you're dealing with is more than half the battle.
Hard-drive recovery happens on our own bench — sourcing matched donor heads and parts, imaging failing drives sector by sector, and rebuilding broken file systems.
More on hard drive recovery →With no moving parts, solid-state drives never click or grind — they fail abruptly and without warning instead. The usual causes are controller lock-ups, firmware faults and outright "sudden death". Two things set SSDs apart from hard drives, and both count: TRIM, which wipes deleted data for good within minutes, and flash's habit of slowly bleeding away its charge when left unpowered.
Our engineers go in at controller level on dead SSDs — reading the NAND directly in technical mode and rebuilding the drive's translator tables to bring the data back.
More on SSD & NVMe recovery →Inside its case, an external drive is just an ordinary hard drive or SSD — so it can fail in all the same ways, plus two that are its own: the small USB-to-SATA bridge board wiring it up, and the hardware encryption a lot of enclosures apply without being asked. That encryption is exactly why shucking the drive and reading it straight usually yields nothing but scrambled data.
On our own bench we work around failed bridge boards, decrypt bridge-encrypted volumes, and handle head and motor repairs on dropped units.
More on external drive recovery →A USB stick is little more than flash memory sitting on a tiny controller chip. The good news is that when one dies, it's normally the controller or a broken connector at fault, while the memory holding your files lives on. The catch: the controller scrambles that data, so retrieving it is specialist work — well beyond any "repair" utility.
We read the memory chip itself — lifting it off, or reaching a monolithic stick's internal test pads — and reconstruct your files straight from the raw flash.
More on USB stick recovery →Two things corrupt memory cards more than anything else: being yanked out (or the camera cutting out) mid-write, and an accidental in-camera format. Either way the photos and video nearly always survive — it's the index pointing to them that breaks. The key is not to overwrite them before they can be pulled back.
We take an image of the card, carve the photos and video out by their file signatures, and then rebuild the folder structure — across SD, microSD, CF and XQD.
More on memory card recovery →Recovery on a modern Mac runs into two obstacles. The first is APFS, Apple's file system, which a failed update can leave in a broken state. Second comes the T2 or Apple-silicon security chip, encrypting the storage that's usually soldered straight to the logic board. Between them, your data exists in readable form only while that board still works — and only if you hold the key.
We do the chip-level work to image encrypted Mac storage, repair damaged APFS containers, and open FileVault volumes using your key.
More on Mac & MacBook recovery →When a Windows laptop or PC won't start, your files are usually intact — the real question is whether the drive is dying or it's merely the operating system that's broken. Those two demand entirely different handling, and mistaking a failing drive for a software hiccup is precisely how recoverable data disappears.
We image the drive and recover from both dying mechanical hard drives and dead SSDs — Dell, HP, Lenovo, whatever the make.
More on laptop & PC recovery →RAID arrays and NAS boxes buy you redundancy — the ability to ride out one disk dying — but they are not a backup. The trouble begins when a second disk goes, or a rebuild lands on one that's already weak. The most damaging move of all is allowing the array to rebuild or re-initialise onto a dying disk, which can wipe out the very data you set out to save.
We copy each disk read-only, work out the array's stripe, parity and disk order in software, then mend the file system sitting on top — whatever the vendor.
More on RAID recovery →The least expensive recovery is the one that never happens. A handful of habits keep your data safe long before anything breaks.
For anything you can't afford to lose, keep three copies across two different kinds of media, with one held off-site or in the cloud. A single drive is never a backup.
A backup you've never restored from isn't really a backup — it's wishful thinking. Now and then, actually open a file off it and confirm it works.
Odd noises, recurring freezes, files that refuse to open, SMART alerts — these are a drive calling for help. Back it up and swap it out before it fails for good.
Because TRIM clears deleted data off an SSD within minutes, move quickly if you delete something by accident. And never let one sit unpowered for months as your sole copy — flash gradually loses its charge.
Impacts, heat, liquids and static are all drive-killers. Keep yours cushioned, cool and dry, shut it down before you move it, and earth yourself before handling bare boards.
A surge protector — better still, a UPS for desktops and NAS units — defends against the spikes and abrupt cuts that corrupt file systems and burn out circuit boards.
The web is awash with "quick fixes" that do more damage than good. These are the ones we watch wreck the most drives.
Every recovery opens with a free written diagnosis. You'll know what can be saved and what it will cost before any billable work begins — and on most jobs, no fix means no fee.