Camera cards can fail for a wide range of reasons. Some are logical (software/data-level) and some are physical (hardware-level). Here are the most common problems we see and recover from every day:

Deleted Photos and Videos

Accidentally deleted your photos? Reformatted the card in-camera or on a computer? In most cases, the data is still on the card and can be recovered. We go beyond what consumer software can do, especially when file system metadata has been overwritten or the card has been partially reused after deletion. We can read the physical memory chip(s) to recover fragments of data still on the media.

Corrupted or Unreadable Camera Cards

If your camera card shows errors like “Card cannot be read,” “Memory card error,” or “Format disk?” — don’t format it. The data is likely still intact on the NAND flash memory. We can image the card at a raw level and reconstruct the file system to retrieve your files.

Camera Card Not Detected

When a camera card isn’t recognized by your computer or camera at all, it usually indicates a controller failure or physical damage. We can bypass the onboard controller entirely and read data directly from the NAND memory chip — a technique called off-chip or chip-off recovery.

Video File Reconstruction

Video files from cameras and drones (MP4, MOV, AVCHD) are especially fragile because they’re written as large contiguous streams. If a card fails mid-recording or the file index is lost, we can reconstruct video files frame by frame from the raw NAND data — recovering footage that software alone cannot salvage.

Monolithic Camera Card Recovery

MicroSD cards and some SD cards use a monolithic design — the controller and NAND flash are fused into a single chip package with no external pins to access. This makes traditional chip-off recovery impossible. We’ve developed specialized techniques to recover data from monolithic camera cards by directly interfacing with the chip’s internal bond pads. This is one of the most technically demanding forms of data recovery, and very few labs in the world offer it.