SanDisk data recovery — cards, sticks & the counterfeit problem.

Put the counterfeits aside for now. Genuine SanDisk media is fine quality, but it has a particularly rough way of life and our bench will feel the results in three ways. Most commonly, there is simply corruption: you pulled the card while writing to it, moved it around from camera to phone to laptop (each using different methods to manage it) or just wore it down too much; this is when you get the dreaded “format this card” message. We go through all possible causes of corruption in detail in our SD corruption guide. Second is physical damage: the broken microSD, damaged large-format card, and/or the Cruzer stick ripped loose inside a laptop port. And this is where SanDisk media reveals a new twist in modern times: most of their cards and many of their sticks are monolithic, one piece of plastic containing a single sealed wafer of chip and controller, fused into one piece with nothing to unsolder. So if you want to recover data, you need to read test points on the wafer itself. This requires a laboratory setting. Third is “silent death”: the card won’t even be recognised by readers, the controller is dead, and photos generally still exist but are inaccessible. There are recovery routes for all three scenarios; none are aided by answering yes to the format question.

The cost of being the most copied name in storage is paid by the customer. The counterfeit SanDisk cards appear as flawless packages, and have the controllers reprogrammed so that the advertised capacity exceeds the real size of the flash memory. They will work flawlessly (or very close) until the user fills beyond the true capacity, at which time they will begin silently rewriting data files on top of each other and cause large-scale corruption. “My new 256 GB card destroyed everything after the first weekend” is virtually verbatim what we get repeatedly, and nearly always the culprit was a bargain from a marketplace. Using a free program, the capacity test will expose the counterfeit card before you entrust it. Recovering from such is possible but would need to be done from the back foot. In addition to counterfeits, there were also documented widespread failure issues throughout 2023 with the Extreme portable SSD series. Firmware and hardware updates were used to correct these problems; if your unit falls within that time frame check the serial number against SanDisk’s advisory list. We are not arguing against the brand; all of these are arguments that no single card, whatever the badge claims, should ever have the only copy of anything.

The decision as to which lane your card will be assigned depends entirely upon whether the computer can still read the card. If it can then the job is a home job: pull the card out of the camera, plug into a real card reader, and use PhotoRec to move all those pictures into a folder on the computer; the steps are outlined in our deleted-photos plan. If it cannot (an undetectable card, a snapped card, a monolith, or a picture so important that you don’t want to take the chance of losing it in your initial attempt to recover them at the kitchen table) then it’s a bench job and we have an SD & memory card service that includes monolith test point readings, begins with a complimentary 48-hour diagnostic, contains a fixed written quote, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Regardless of which lane recovers this one, establishing the routine that will prevent the next from being lost is easy: consider cards nothing but couriers rather than vaults; get these pictures off the card within days and copy them to two locations if they mean something.