Last updated: September 2026 — Reviewed by the RecuperaTusDatos Technical Team
Is your card asking to be formatted, showing an empty folder or no longer recognised at all — or did you format it in the camera by mistake?
Do one thing right now: take the card out and stop using it. Do not format it, do not let the camera or phone "repair" it, and do not point recovery software at it. Every further use writes to the card, and each write lets the controller erase and reuse flash blocks that still hold your files. That is what turns a recoverable card into a lost one.
At RecuperaTusDatos we recover photos, video and documents from SD, SDHC, SDXC, microSD, CompactFlash, CFexpress, XQD and Memory Stick cards — from simply unreadable to snapped in half. Laboratory in Barcelona with an ISO Class 5 clean room.
Free diagnosis in 4 hours. No recovery, no fee.
Professional memory card data recovery for photographers, videographers, drone and action-camera users, and anyone who has lost files from a phone card. SD, microSD, CompactFlash, CFexpress, XQD and Memory Stick, every brand: SanDisk, Lexar, Sony, Samsung, Kingston, Transcend, ProGrade. ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certified by AENOR, and registered with INCIBE. Over 12 years of experience. No recovery, no fee.
Key Facts — Memory Card Recovery
- Standard recoveries: from 250 EUR + VAT, with a fixed written quote before any work begins
- Diagnosis: free, in 4 hours, whether or not you accept the quote
- Guarantee: no data, no fee
- Cards: SD, SDHC, SDXC, microSD, CompactFlash, CFexpress, XQD, Memory Stick
- Files: camera RAW, JPEG, HEIC, MP4, MOV, MXF, AVCHD, documents
- Laboratory: Barcelona, ISO Class 5 clean room, ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 (AENOR), registered with INCIBE
- Track record: over 12 years, more than 18,000 cases, 93% success rate, 4.8/5 from 487 reviews
What to Do Right Now
Before you try anything else
- Eject the card and leave it out. Every new frame, clip or regenerated thumbnail can land on the space your lost files still occupy.
- Do not format, however firmly the camera or the operating system insists. The prompt means the file system cannot be read — not that the photos have gone.
- Do not let Windows "scan and fix", do not run CHKDSK, do not run First Aid on macOS. Those tools repair the file system by overwriting it, destroying the map we use to put your filenames, dates and folders back.
- Do not run recovery software on the card itself, and never save its output to the same card.
- If the card is bent, cracked or snapped, stop inserting it. Each insertion risks a short across the damaged contacts, which can destroy what is still readable.
- Send it exactly as it is. Untouched is always better than tidied up. Do tell us what has already been tried, though — it changes how we approach the card.
Our emergency checklist covers the first hour after any kind of data loss.
How Cameras and Phones Actually Write to a Card
A memory card is not a box of files. It is a small computer: a controller running its own firmware on top of raw NAND flash. Your camera sends it numbered sectors formatted as FAT32 or exFAT; the controller decides where in the flash those sectors physically live and keeps a private table mapping one to the other. Flash cannot be overwritten in place — a whole block must be erased before any page inside it can be written again — so the controller moves data around, spreads wear across the chip and erases blocks it believes are free. That work is invisible to you, and it happens whenever anything writes to the card: a camera saving a frame or rebuilding thumbnails, an operating system "repairing" the file system. It is why every further use can push your lost files further out of reach.
Saving a photo takes three steps: write the image data, write a directory entry with the filename and date, and update the allocation table that lists the clusters the file occupies. An interrupted write — a flat battery, a card pulled while the access light is on, a jolt that breaks contact for a millisecond — can complete the first step and lose the other two. The picture is physically on the card; the index pointing at it is not. The camera then reports the card as empty or asks you to format it.
Video is worse. A clip is one continuous stream, and in MP4 and MOV the index telling a player where each frame begins is normally written last, when you press stop. Lose power mid-take and the data is complete but the index never existed: the file shows as zero bytes, or will not open at all. That index has to be rebuilt from the stream, which is reconstruction rather than copying.
Five Failures That Look the Same From Outside
Logical Failure
The card mounts and the controller answers, but the file system is damaged, deleted or replaced by an in-camera format. Symptoms: a request to format, an empty folder, a wrong reported size, files with impossible dates. The data is still reachable through normal reads, so all work happens on a read-only image and nothing touches the original.
Dead or Failing Controller
Nothing appears in any reader, the card reports zero capacity, or it grows warm and disconnects. The flash may be perfectly intact, but the chip that translates sectors into flash addresses has failed. The only route is to read the NAND directly and rebuild the translation layer, error correction and page interleaving in software, without the controller's help.
Contact and Physical Damage
Worn or corroded contacts, a cracked body, a card snapped at the notch, a microSD that went through the wash. Damage to the outside of a card is not the same as damage to the memory inside it: the flash die very often survives intact, and the job is to reach it and read it. In the meantime, stop pushing the card into a reader.
Monolithic microSD
A modern microSD is monolithic: controller and flash are moulded into a single package, with no separable memory chip to lift off and nothing to desolder. Access is through test pads on the card body, and because the dump arrives without the controller's mapping, the image must be reassembled from first principles before a single photo appears.
Counterfeit Cards
A counterfeit card is a genuine low-capacity card whose controller has been reprogrammed to claim a size it does not have. Everything looks normal until you fill past the real capacity. The symptom is photos that open as grey halves, or do not open at all. We recover whatever was genuinely stored — what the card only pretended to store was never written.
Why Recovery Software Makes a Failing Card Worse
Consumer recovery tools assume the card underneath them is healthy and only the file system is broken. On a card that is already struggling, that assumption does real damage.
They write to the card they are trying to read
Scratch files, scan databases, repaired file-system structures and, worst of all, recovered files saved back to the same card. Each write tells the controller it may erase and reuse a block that could hold your photos.
Long scans keep a dying card powered and hot
A full surface scan hammers a weak card for hours. Repeated retries on marginal cells keep the package warm and give a controller that is already failing thousands of extra chances to stop answering for good. Cards that reach us after a night of scanning are often worse than when the loss happened.
Repair functions overwrite the map we need
Anything that offers to fix the file system builds a new allocation table over the old one. Once that happens the original filenames, dates and folders are gone, and even a good recovery comes back as a heap of numbered files.
They return broken files without saying so
Signature carving finds where a file starts and guesses where it ends. The result opens, looks plausible and is silently truncated halfway through — something you may only discover months later, once the card has been reused.
We do the opposite: a complete read-only image first, with the original write-blocked, and every attempt afterwards on copies of that image. If one approach fails, the card is exactly as it was and we can try another. The same discipline governs the NAND-level work behind SSD and flash recovery and phone storage in iPhone, iPad and MacBook recovery.
Rebuilding RAW Photos and Video Files
When the file system survives, recovery is mostly bookkeeping: read the image, follow the allocation table, write the files out with their original names and timestamps. When the file system has been formatted away, we work from the files themselves.
Camera RAW formats help here, because they are tightly structured. CR2 and CR3, NEF, ARW, RAF, ORF, RW2 and DNG all begin with a recognisable header, carry an internal directory of offsets and lengths, and usually embed a full-size preview beside the sensor data. That structure lets us work out where each file genuinely ends instead of guessing — the difference between a RAW your editor develops normally and a RAW that shows a thumbnail and then fails. JPEG and HEIC follow the same logic.
Video takes more work, because what is missing from an interrupted recording is the index described above rather than the picture itself. We rebuild it by walking the stream, identifying frame boundaries and sample sizes from the codec structure, and writing a correct header around the data that is already there. Long clips are usually fragmented across the card, so the pieces also have to be put back in order before the file plays through.
We are honest about the limits: files whose middle sections were overwritten come back only in part, and we tell you which ones before you decide anything. Every case ends with a verified list of what has actually been recovered, so you know exactly what you are paying for. Our methodology page sets out the full approach.
What Is Usually Recoverable — and What Is Not
Usually recoverable
- Photos and clips deleted in camera, on a phone or on a computer, if nothing has been written since.
- Cards formatted in camera, which normally rewrites only the index and leaves the image data untouched.
- Cards that ask to be formatted, show as "RAW" because the file system cannot be read, or report the wrong capacity.
- Files broken by an interrupted write, including video that never received its index.
- Cards no longer detected because of failed contacts or a failed controller.
- Cracked, snapped or water-damaged cards whose flash die is intact.
Difficult or impossible
- Anything genuinely overwritten. If you carried on shooting after the loss, new frames physically replaced the old ones.
- A full (non-quick) format done on a computer, which writes over the whole card rather than only the index.
- A flash die that is shattered, burnt or cracked through the silicon.
- Encrypted cards where the key or passphrase is not available.
- Cards already scanned and "repaired" at length by consumer software, whose original structures have been rewritten.
Nobody can guarantee a recovery, and you should be wary of anyone who does. What we promise is that you know where you stand before you commit: a free diagnosis in 4 hours, a fixed written quote before anything is done, and no fee for the recovery if we do not recover your data.
What Memory Card Recovery Costs
Standard recoveries start from 250 EUR + VAT. The final figure depends on the state of the card: one that a reader can still talk to is a different job from a monolithic microSD read at die level. Either way you receive a fixed written quote before any work begins, and the price does not move afterwards. The diagnosis is free and completed in 4 hours, whether or not you accept the quote. If we do not recover your data, you do not pay for the recovery.
Frequently Asked Questions — Memory Card Recovery
My camera says the card needs to be formatted. Should I do it?
No. That message means the camera cannot read the file system, not that the card is empty. The photographs are still physically stored in the flash. Formatting replaces the index that tells us where each file begins and ends, which makes the job harder and the results less complete. Take the card out, leave it out, and send it to us as it is.
I formatted the card in the camera by mistake. Are the photos gone?
Usually not. An in-camera format normally writes a fresh, empty index and leaves the image data where it was, so the files survive until new photographs land on top of them. What decides the outcome is what happened next: if you stopped immediately, the odds are good. If you carried on shooting on the same card, the new frames have physically replaced part of the old ones.
My microSD is not recognised by any phone or reader at all. Is it still recoverable?
Often, yes. A card that is completely invisible has usually lost its controller, the chip that translates ordinary sector requests into flash addresses, while the flash itself is undamaged. In that situation we read the memory directly and rebuild the translation layer, the error correction and the page ordering in software. Modern microSD cards are monolithic, with controller and memory moulded into a single package, so the work is done through test pads on the card body.
A video stopped when my battery died and now the file will not open. Can it be saved?
In most cases it can. MP4 and MOV files normally keep their index, the block that maps timecode to positions in the file, at the end, and it is written only when you press stop. A recording cut short by a flat battery keeps its video data but never gets that index, so players report a damaged or zero-byte file. We rebuild the index from the recorded stream and write a correct header around the data that is already there.
I bought a cheap high-capacity card online and half my photos are corrupt. What happened?
That is the classic signature of a counterfeit card. The controller has been reprogrammed to report a capacity the flash does not physically have, so all is well until the card passes its real size. After that, new writes either wrap around and overwrite earlier files or are discarded silently. We can recover whatever was genuinely stored, often a great deal, but files the card only pretended to save were never written to memory at all.
Should I try free recovery software first?
Not if the card matters to you. Those tools assume the hardware underneath them is healthy: they write working files to the card, they offer to repair the file system by overwriting it, and a long scan keeps a failing card powered and hot for hours. They also return truncated files that look fine until you examine them. After a simple deletion on healthy media you may be lucky, but if the card is unreadable, undetected or physically damaged, scanning it reduces what a laboratory can still do.
My SD card snapped in two. Is that the end?
Not necessarily. A full-size SD card is mostly empty plastic, and the memory itself occupies a small part of the body, so a clean break frequently misses the silicon altogether. If the flash die survived, the contents usually survived with it and the task is to reach the die and read it. What you must not do is keep pushing a broken card into a reader, because a short across damaged contacts can destroy what is still there.
How much does memory card recovery cost, and what do I pay if it fails?
Standard recoveries start from 250 EUR + VAT, and you always receive a fixed written quote before any work begins, so the price cannot change halfway through. The diagnosis is free and completed within 4 hours whether or not you accept that quote. If we do not recover your data, you do not pay for the recovery.
Card Unreadable? Take It Out and Talk to Us.
Free diagnosis in 4 hours, whether or not you accept the quote. Fixed written quote before any work begins. No recovery, no fee.
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