Practical, device-by-device advice on what to do — and what to steer clear of — the moment storage starts to fail. Drawn from over two decades of recovering drives in-house, because that first move so often decides whether your data comes back at all.
Most data is lost after the failure rather than during it — by pressing on regardless. The rules here apply to every device below.
Whatever the device, these same five moves protect your data and your odds of a full recovery. Run through them before trying anything else.
Every photo shot, file saved or program launched can overwrite data that's still recoverable. Set the device aside.
If it's clicking, beeping or failing to spin, cut the power straight away. Every power cycle of a failing drive risks turning the damage permanent.
On a physically failing drive, recovery and "repair" tools keep it running and pound the weak areas — usually turning a recoverable drive into a lost cause.
No freezer tricks, no cracking open the casing, no swapping circuit boards. These myths do real, frequently irreversible damage.
Drop it off or post it in fully insured. We tell you exactly what can be recovered, and what it costs, before any chargeable work starts.
Choose the device you're facing for its 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 still 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. Working out which one you've got is half the battle.
We recover hard drives in-house — matching donor heads and parts, imaging weak drives sector by sector, and rebuilding broken file systems.
More on hard drive recovery →Solid-state drives have no moving parts, so they never click or grind — instead they tend to die suddenly and without warning. Controller lock-ups, firmware faults and "sudden death" are the usual suspects. Two things set SSDs apart from hard drives, and both matter: TRIM, which wipes deleted data for good within minutes, and the way flash slowly bleeds its charge when left unpowered.
Our engineers read the NAND directly in technical mode, rebuild the drive's translator tables, and work at the controller level to bring data back from dead SSDs.
More on SSD & NVMe recovery →An external drive is just an ordinary hard drive or SSD in a case — so it fails in all the same ways, plus two of its own: the small USB-to-SATA bridge board that wires it up, and the hardware encryption many enclosures apply on their own. That encryption is exactly why pulling the drive out and reading it directly often gives you nothing but scrambled data.
We work around failed bridge boards, decrypt bridge-encrypted volumes, and handle head and motor work on dropped units — all in-house.
More on external drive recovery →A USB stick is flash memory sitting 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 comes through fine. The bad news: that data is scrambled by the controller, so retrieving it is specialist work — never a job for a "repair" tool.
We read the memory chip directly — chip-off, or via 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 one of two reasons: they're yanked out (or the camera dies) mid-write, or they're formatted in-camera by accident. Either way the photos and video nearly always survive — what breaks is the index that points to them. The knack is not overwriting 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 — across SD, microSD, CF and XQD.
More on memory card recovery →Modern Macs bring 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 on recent models is soldered to the logic board. Between them, your data only exists as readable files while that board is alive, and only if you hold the key.
On Macs with a removable or Fusion Drive, we rebuild damaged APFS containers and unlock FileVault volumes using your key. Where the storage is soldered to the logic board, as on T2 and Apple-silicon Macs, that isn't something we can take on.
More on Mac & MacBook recovery →When a Windows laptop or PC won't boot, your files are usually intact — the real question is whether the drive is failing or it's simply the operating system that's broken. The two call for completely different handling, and treating a failing drive as 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 room to survive a single disk failing — but they are not a backup. The trouble starts when a second disk goes, or a rebuild runs onto a disk that's already weak. The 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, rebuild 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 have to make. A handful of habits keep your data safe long before anything fails.
Keep three copies of anything you can't afford to lose, on two different kinds of media, with one held off-site or in the cloud. A single drive is never a backup.
A backup you've never restored from isn't a backup — it's wishful thinking. Every so often, actually open a file from it and confirm it works.
Odd noises, repeated freezes, files that won't open and SMART warnings are a drive crying out for help. Back it up and replace it before it fails outright.
SSDs wipe deleted data within minutes (TRIM), so move fast on an accidental delete. And never leave one as your only copy, unpowered, for months — flash slowly loses charge.
Drops, heat, liquids and static all kill drives. Keep them padded, cool and dry, shut them down before moving them, and earth yourself before touching bare boards.
A surge protector — better still 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 awash with "quick fixes" that do more harm than good. Here are the ones we see wreck the most drives.
Every recovery begins with a free written diagnostic. We tell you what can be recovered and what it'll cost before any chargeable work — and on most jobs, no fix means no fee.