Straightforward, device-by-device guidance on what to do — and what to avoid — the instant a drive gives out.
More data is lost in the aftermath than in the failure itself — by carrying on regardless. Stopping is the most useful thing you can do.
Whatever the device, the same five moves guard your data and your chances of a full recovery. Work through them before you try anything else.
Every file saved, photo taken or app opened can write over data that's still recoverable. Put the device down.
Clicking, beeping or refusing to spin? Kill the power at once — every restart of a failing drive risks making the harm permanent.
Run over a physically failing drive, recovery and "repair" tools keep it spinning and hammer the weak spots — often turning a recoverable drive into a write-off.
Skip the freezer tricks, don't open the casing, don't swap circuit boards — these myths cause real, often permanent damage.
Bring it in or send it fully insured. We'll tell you precisely what's recoverable, and the cost, before any chargeable work starts.
Pick the device you're dealing with to see its symptoms, the dos and don'ts, and how we recover that kind of media.
A spinning hard drive can go two very different ways. A logical failure — data deleted, formatted or corrupted — leaves the mechanics working and is usually the safer kind to recover. A physical one — dead electronics, a seized motor, failed heads — needs bench work, and one wrong move can end it. Half the job is telling the two apart.
In-house, we fit matched donor heads and parts, image fragile drives sector by sector, and rebuild the file systems that have broken.
More on hard drive recovery →With no moving parts, an SSD never clicks or grinds — it simply dies, usually all at once and unannounced. Firmware faults, controller lock-ups and "sudden death" head the list. Two quirks separate SSDs from hard drives and both count: TRIM, which erases deleted data for good within minutes, and the charge that flash slowly loses while it sits unpowered.
Working in technical mode, our engineers read the NAND straight off, rebuild the translator tables, and operate at controller level to pull data back from dead SSDs.
More on SSD & NVMe recovery →Strip away the case and an external is just a normal hard drive or SSD, so every one of those faults applies — plus two extras: the little USB-to-SATA bridge that connects it, and the hardware encryption plenty of enclosures add themselves. That encryption is precisely why yanking the drive out and reading it raw tends to hand you nothing but scrambled data.
We route around dead bridge boards, decrypt bridge-encrypted volumes, and take on head and motor work for dropped units — all in-house.
More on external drive recovery →A USB stick is flash memory on a tiny controller chip. Happily, when one fails it's normally the controller or a snapped connector at fault while the memory with your data survives intact. Less happily, the controller scrambles that data, so getting it back is specialist work — never something for a "repair" utility.
We read the memory chip itself — chip-off, or through a monolithic stick's internal test pads — and reconstruct your files from the raw flash.
More on USB stick recovery →Two things corrupt memory cards more than any other: being pulled out (or the camera dying) mid-write, or an accidental in-camera format. Either way, the photos and video almost always survive — it's the index pointing at them that breaks. The trick is not overwriting them before recovery.
We image the card, carve the photos and video back out by their file signatures, then rebuild the folders — across XQD, CF, microSD and SD.
More on memory card recovery →Two things complicate a modern Mac. First, APFS, Apple's file system, which a failed update can leave in a broken state. Second, the T2 or Apple-silicon security chip that encrypts the storage — storage soldered to the logic board on recent models. Together they mean your data reads as files only while that board lives, and only if you hold the key.
For Macs with a Fusion or removable drive, we mend broken APFS containers and open FileVault volumes with your key. When the storage is soldered down, as on T2 and Apple-silicon Macs, that isn't work we can take on.
More on Mac & MacBook recovery →A Windows laptop or PC that won't boot usually still holds your files intact — the real question is whether the drive is dying or it's only the operating system that's broken. Each demands wholly different handling, and mistaking a failing drive for a software hiccup is how recoverable data disappears.
We image the drive and recover from both dying mechanical disks and dead SSDs — Lenovo, HP, Dell and the rest.
More on laptop & PC recovery →Redundancy is what RAID arrays and NAS boxes buy you — enough slack to ride out one failed disk — but it isn't a backup. Things unravel when a second disk drops, or a rebuild runs onto a disk already on its way out. The single worst move is allowing a rebuild or re-initialise onto a dying disk — it can write over the very data you're hoping to save.
Every disk is imaged read-only; we then reconstruct the stripe, parity and disk order virtually and repair the file system on top — whatever the vendor.
More on RAID recovery →The cheapest recovery is the one you never need. A few habits keep your data safe long before anything breaks.
Hold three copies of anything you can't lose, across two different media types, with one kept off-site or in the cloud. One drive alone is never a backup.
An untested backup isn't really a backup at all — it's a hope. Now and then, actually open a file from it and check it works.
Strange noises, constant freezes, files that won't open, SMART warnings — that's a drive asking for help. Back it up and replace it before it goes for good.
Because TRIM wipes deleted data within minutes, act fast after an accidental delete on an SSD. And never leave one as your sole copy, unpowered, for months — flash slowly loses charge.
Heat, drops, static and liquid all kill drives. Keep them cushioned, cool and dry, shut them off before you move them, and ground yourself before handling bare boards.
A surge protector — better yet a UPS for desktops and NAS units — buffers the surges and abrupt outages that scramble file systems and cook boards.
The web is full of "quick fixes" that cause more harm than good. These are the ones we see wreck the most drives.
Every recovery opens with a free written diagnostic. We'll tell you what can come back and what it'll cost before a penny becomes chargeable — and for most jobs, no fix means no fee.