Practical, device-by-device advice on what to do — and what to avoid — the moment storage starts to fail. Written from over twenty-five years of recovering drives in-house, because the right first move often decides whether your data comes back at all.
Most data is lost after the failure, not during it — by carrying on regardless. These rules apply to every device below.
Whatever the device, the same five moves protect your data and your chances of a full recovery. Work through them before you try anything else.
Every photo taken, file saved or program opened can overwrite data that's still recoverable. Put the device down.
If it's clicking, beeping or not spinning, switch it off at once. Each power cycle of a failing drive risks making the damage permanent.
On a physically failing drive, recovery and "repair" tools keep it powered and hammer the weak areas — usually turning a recoverable drive into a lost one.
No freezer tricks, no opening the casing, no swapping circuit boards. These myths cause real, often irreversible damage.
Drop it off or post it to us fully insured. We tell you exactly what's recoverable, and what it costs, before any chargeable work begins.
Pick the device you're dealing with for the warning signs, the dos and don'ts, and how recovery works for that media.
Spinning hard drives fail in two very different ways. Logical failures — deleted, formatted or corrupted data — leave the drive working and are often the safest to recover. Physical failures — failed heads, a seized motor or dead electronics — mean the drive needs bench work, and the wrong first move can finish it off. Knowing which one you're facing is the whole game.
We recover hard drives in-house — matching donor heads and parts, imaging weak drives sector by sector, and rebuilding damaged file systems.
More on hard drive recovery →Solid-state drives have no moving parts, so they don't click or grind — they tend to fail suddenly and silently. Controller lock-ups, firmware faults and "sudden death" are the usual culprits. Two things make SSDs different from hard drives, and both matter: TRIM, which permanently erases deleted data within minutes, and the fact that flash slowly loses its charge when left unpowered.
Our engineers read the NAND directly in technical mode, rebuild the drive's translator tables, and work at controller level to bring data back from dead SSDs.
More on SSD & NVMe recovery →An external drive is a normal hard drive or SSD in a case — so it can fail in all the same ways, plus two of its own: the little USB-to-SATA bridge board that connects it, and the hardware encryption many enclosures apply automatically. That encryption is why pulling the drive out and reading it directly often gives you nothing but scrambled data.
We bypass failed bridge boards, decrypt bridge-encrypted volumes, and carry out head and motor work on dropped units — all in-house.
More on external drive recovery →A USB stick is flash memory on a tiny controller chip. The good news: when one fails, it's usually the controller or a snapped connector that's gone, while the memory holding your data survives. The bad news: that data is scrambled by the controller, so getting it back is specialist work — not a job for a "repair" tool.
We read the memory chip directly — chip-off, or through a monolithic stick's internal test pads — and rebuild your files from the raw flash.
More on USB stick recovery →Memory cards corrupt most often for two reasons: they're pulled out (or the camera dies) mid-write, or they're formatted in-camera by mistake. In both cases the photos and video almost always survive — what's broken is the index that points to them. The trick is not to overwrite them before they can be recovered.
We image the card and carve your photos and video out by their file signatures, then rebuild the folder structure — SD, microSD, CF and XQD.
More on memory card recovery →Modern Macs add two complications to recovery. The first is APFS, Apple's file system, which can be left in a broken state after a failed update. The second is the T2 or Apple-silicon security chip, which encrypts the storage — storage that's usually soldered to the logic board. Together they mean your data only exists as readable files while that board is alive, and only if you have the key.
We carry out chip-level work to image encrypted Mac storage, rebuild damaged APFS containers, and unlock FileVault volumes with your key.
More on Mac & MacBook recovery →When a Windows laptop or PC won't boot, your files are usually fine — the real question is whether the drive is failing or it's just the operating system that's broken. The two need completely different handling, and treating a failing drive like a software glitch is how recoverable data gets lost.
We image the drive, and recover from both failing mechanical hard drives and dead SSDs — Dell, HP, Lenovo and the rest.
More on laptop & PC recovery →RAID arrays and NAS boxes give you redundancy — the ability to survive a disk failing — but they are not a backup. Trouble starts when a second disk fails, or a rebuild runs onto a disk that's already weak. The single most damaging thing you can do is let the array rebuild or re-initialise onto a failing disk, which can overwrite the very data you're trying to save.
We image each disk read-only, reconstruct the array's stripe, parity and disk order virtually, then repair the file system on top — vendor-agnostic.
More on RAID recovery →The cheapest recovery is the one you never need. A few habits keep your data safe long before anything fails.
Keep three copies of anything you can't afford to lose, on two different types of media, with one kept off-site or in the cloud. One drive is never a backup.
A backup you've never restored from isn't a backup — it's a hope. Every so often, actually open a file from it and check it works.
Unusual noises, repeated freezes, files that won't open and SMART warnings are a drive asking for help. Back up and replace it before it fails outright.
SSDs erase deleted data within minutes (TRIM), so act fast on accidental deletion. And don't leave one as your only copy unpowered for months — flash slowly loses charge.
Drops, heat, liquids and static all kill drives. Keep them cushioned, cool and dry, power them down before moving them, and ground yourself before touching bare boards.
A surge protector — ideally a UPS for desktops and NAS units — guards against the spikes and sudden cuts that corrupt file systems and fry circuit boards.
The internet is full of "quick fixes" that do more harm than good. Here are the ones we see ruin the most drives.
Every recovery starts with a free written diagnostic. We tell you what's recoverable and what it will cost before any chargeable work — on most jobs, no fix means no fee.