Case Study — SD Card Recovery
One click reformatted the card. Every photo still came back.
A Belfast client's SD card held irreplaceable photos and videos. When it stopped being recognised and an accidental click reformatted it, the data looked gone. It wasn't — worn memory cells were the real fault, and every file was recovered.
The situation
An irreplaceable card, an accidental reformat.
Photos and videos are usually the one file type nobody has a second copy of.
A client based in Belfast came to us after losing the photos and videos on an SD card — files with no other copy anywhere. The trouble started when they tried to transfer the files across to a computer: the computer didn't recognise the card at all, and instead prompted a reformat.
One accidental click on that prompt was all it took. The SD card was reformatted in full.
A reformat is a small action with big consequences. It doesn't erase the data outright, but every extra write to the card afterwards makes recovery harder. The client stopped there and brought the card to us rather than trying anything further.
Diagnosis
Worn cells, not physical damage.
The card hadn't been dropped, bent or exposed to liquid.
Diagnosis found a small number of damaged memory cells on the card — this, not the reformat, was what had stopped the computer recognising the device in the first place. There was no sign of physical trauma: no cracked casing, no bent contacts, nothing consistent with an impact.
The cause was simply wear. Flash memory cells have a finite number of write cycles, and on this card a few had reached the end of theirs. That was enough to make the card unreadable to a normal computer, even though the data written to the rest of the chip was still intact.
Outcome
100% of the data recovered.
Working around the damaged cells and the reformat, we recovered every file on the card — 100% of the client's lost photos and videos, restored in full.
It's a result that depends on stopping early. Once a card is showing signs of not being recognised, further attempts to fix it — including accepting a reformat prompt — are exactly what risk turning a recoverable card into a permanent loss.
Stop using it, don't reformat, and don't try repair software. Tell us what happened and we'll give you a straight answer on what's recoverable — and what it costs — before any work begins.