SD & Memory Card Data Recovery - NZ-Wide From Our Auckland Lab

The card that held the wedding, the dive trip, the drone footage or three months of dashcam - and now it's blank, corrupted or asking to be formatted. Kiwi Data Recovery handles memory card data recovery from our Auckland lab: deleted and formatted cards, cards no computer will read, snapped microSDs and modern monolithic cards that need reading at chip level. Drop it in, or post it to us from anywhere in New Zealand.

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Assessment from $230. You get findings and a firm quote before any recovery work starts.

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  • Auckland lab - work done in-house
  • Specialists since 2016
  • Assessment from $230
  • Firm quote before any recovery work
  • Overnight courier, NZ-wide
  • Recovery from an image - not your original drive

Cards we recover

Every common format, from the card in your camera today to the one in a drawer since 2008.

  • SD, SDHC, SDXC, SDUC & SD Express The full-size cards in mirrorless bodies, DSLRs and audio recorders - SanDisk, Lexar, Sony, Kingston, Samsung, ProGrade, Angelbird. From 2GB antiques to modern high-capacity cards, including the fast V60 and V90 video-rated ones.
  • microSD & microSDXC The most-recovered card on this page, and the hardest. Phones, drones, dashcams, action cameras, trail cams, the Nintendo Switch, Raspberry Pi projects and security recorders. Nearly all modern microSDs are monolithic, which changes how recovery works - see below.
  • CompactFlash & CFast CompactFlash is the workhorse of older professional bodies and still in plenty of Kiwi camera bags; bent pins are its classic failure, and because the pins live in the camera rather than the card, the card itself usually survives. CFast is current media in Blackmagic, Arri and Canon cinema bodies and uses an edge connector instead.
  • CFexpress Type A & Type B, XQD Current professional video and stills cards. High capacity, high value, and high stakes when one drops out mid-shoot.
  • Memory Stick, xD-Picture Card & MMC Legacy formats from Sony, Olympus, Fuji and early phones. Old cards are welcome; they're often easier than modern ones, and they usually hold the photos nobody else has a copy of.
  • USB sticks and the devices around them Flash drives share these failure modes and this lab work - see USB flash drive data recovery. If the card is fine but the camera or phone is the problem, we handle those too.

Just lost the photos?

Card out, card untouched. The five-minute checklist is below.

The five-minute checklist Call Now

Scenarios we can help with

Find yours below. Whatever it is, the first move is the same: card out, card untouched, assessed properly, firm quote before any recovery work.

Deleted or formatted - usually the good news

  • Photos deleted in-camera, or the whole card wiped by accident - the honest good news, and the reason behind it: deleting a photo edits the card's index rather than erasing the image, and nothing instructs the card to clear it afterwards. The photos usually stay put until new files land on top. Stop shooting and there is normally a lot still there. (The exception is a card used as internal storage in an Android phone, which can be told to clear deleted space like an SSD.)
  • "Format card?" - and you tapped yes - a camera's format is normally a quick one: it resets the filesystem's index rather than erasing every photo. The images are frequently still recoverable. What kills them is what comes next, so don't keep using the card to "test whether it works".
  • Formatted in the wrong camera, or reformatted between bodies - moving one card between two cameras or a camera and a phone can leave conflicting structures behind. Recoverable, and worth doing properly rather than through an app.
  • The one exception, stated plainly - a genuine full or secure erase, or a card that has been written over with new footage, is a different story. What survived is exactly what the assessment establishes before you commit to anything.

The card won't read

  • "The disk is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?" - the message we're rung about most, and the button that does the most damage. It almost always means filesystem corruption, not lost photos. Say no, eject, and stop.
  • The card mounts but shows 0 files, or the wrong capacity - directory damage, a broken partition, or a counterfeit card revealing itself. The files are often intact underneath.
  • Card pulled out mid-write, or the camera battery died mid-save - interrupting a write is a leading cause of corrupted cards, and one of the more recoverable ones.
  • The camera says "card error", "card locked" or "no card" - after the two free checks above, this points at the card's controller or its contacts, or at the camera's own card-detect switch. Bench work either way, and worth trying the card in a second device first.

Physically damaged cards

  • Snapped, cracked or bent - microSD cards break in half surprisingly easily, and a broken card is not automatically a lost card: what matters is whether the memory itself survived. Keep every piece.
  • Through the wash, in the sea, or soaked - water rarely destroys flash memory outright, but corrosion does over time. Don't dry it in rice and don't put it in a reader while damp. With salt water, drying is the enemy: seal the card in a bag while it's still wet and bring it straight in, because salts crystallise on the contacts as it dries and keep eating away afterwards.
  • Melted, crushed, run over, chewed by the dog - all genuinely seen. Bring it in as it is.
  • Bent or broken pins on a CF card - usually damage to the camera's pin block rather than the card. The card often reads perfectly on the bench.

The card is failing, not full

  • Extremely slow, freezing the camera, dropping frames mid-video - a card wearing out. Copy everything off immediately and retire it; a card that behaves like this once will do it again at the worst moment.
  • Photos appearing corrupted, half-grey or split - individual files damaged by a failing card or a bad write. Often partly recoverable from the raw data, and sometimes fully.
  • It worked yesterday and today it's gone - usually the controller or the mapping tables it relies on, often after a power interruption. A card gives you no health data to watch the way a hard drive does, which is why "it was fine last week" tells you nothing.
  • The card has gone read-only - some cards drop into permanent read-only mode at the end of their life. Frustrating, but it's the good outcome: the data is usually still fully readable. Copy it off now and retire the card.

Counterfeit cards - the trap nobody warns you about

  • The bargain 1TB microSD from a marketplace listing - counterfeit cards are rife, and the usual trick is firmware reporting a much larger capacity than the card physically has. It writes happily, appears fine, then loops back over its own data - so the earliest photos vanish and everything looks corrupted at once.
  • How it shows up, and it matters which - some fakes wrap around and overwrite their own earliest files; others silently throw away everything written past the card's real capacity, so those files were never stored at all. Both look the same from the outside: grey or garbled images, and capacity that doesn't match the label.
  • What we can do - read what physically exists and recover what's genuinely there. What was overwritten, or never written in the first place, is gone - and we'll tell you that straight rather than charging you to find out slowly.
  • What to do next time - buy cards from real retailers, and test a new card by filling it once and reading it back before you trust it with anything that matters.

Just lost the photos? The five-minute checklist

  • 1. Take the card out of the device. No more shots, no more clips, no more "let me just check something".
  • 2. Do not format, repair or let the device fix it. Cameras, phones and computers all offer to help. Every one of those offers writes to the card.
  • 3. Do not run recovery software on a card that isn't behaving. For a simple deletion on an otherwise healthy card, good software genuinely can work - image the card sector by sector and run the software against the image, and never write recovered files back to the same card. But if the card won't mount, reads the wrong size or came out of water, software just adds writes and heat to a card that needs neither.
  • 4. Keep every piece, and the adapter it lives in. Snapped corners and broken adapters can matter.
  • 5. Ring the lab before you post it. We'll tell you honestly whether it's worth sending, how to pack it, and what to expect - before you spend anything. Call Now

Why memory card recovery is different

Worth two minutes, because this is where labs genuinely differ - and where "we tried a recovery app" ends.

Most SD and microSD cards are now a single sealed block. In an older card the controller chip and memory chip sit separately on a small board, so a lab can lift the memory chip off and read it. Nearly every modern microSD - and plenty of full-size SD cards - is monolithic instead: controller and memory moulded into one solid slab with nothing to remove. Reading one means finding the card's own internal test points, wiring onto them, and pulling the raw memory contents out directly. It's microscope-and-microsoldering work, which is precisely the background this lab came from. (CompactFlash, CFast and CFexpress went the other way and still use separate chips, which is a different job again.)

Raw memory isn't files. Even after a successful read, what comes back is not your photos - it's scrambled data. The card's controller was scattering data across the chip for wear levelling, correcting errors, and scrambling it with a manufacturer-specific pattern to keep the memory reliable. Recovery means reconstructing that translation - the page and block layout, the error correction, the XOR pattern - before a single photo appears. On the newest, densest memory a raw read sometimes can't be decoded at all without the controller, which is part of why nobody honest promises a result up front.

Cards are cheap and their contents aren't. A $30 card can hold a wedding, a job, or a season of a business's footage. That mismatch is the whole reason this service exists - and also the reason we'll tell you honestly when a card isn't worth the assessment fee, which happens more often on cards than any other device we see.

The files we recover

Where RAW files are recoverable you get the original RAW back, not the small JPEG preview buried inside it. These are the formats we work with:

  • RAW: CR2 and CR3 (Canon), NEF and NRW (Nikon), ARW (Sony), RAF (Fujifilm), ORF (Olympus/OM System), RW2 (Panasonic), PEF (Pentax), DNG
  • Photos: JPEG, HEIC, PNG, TIFF, PSD
  • Video: MP4, MOV, AVCHD/MTS, ProRes, BRAW, R3D, GoPro and DJI files, dashcam clips
  • Audio: WAV, MP3, AIFF, field-recorder formats
  • Everything else: documents, archives and databases from cards used as general storage

Where a file is only partly recoverable we'll say so, and where a damaged image or clip can be repaired we'll tell you what's realistic before you approve anything.

How memory card data recovery works here

  1. 1

    Ring first, then book - from $230

    Tell us the card, the device it came from, and what happened. Cards are the one device where a two-minute phone call regularly saves someone the assessment fee, so ring before you send.

  2. 2

    The card is read, not used

    Healthy cards are imaged sector by sector. Cards that won't respond go to chip-level work - monolith test points or memory removal - so nothing depends on the card behaving.

  3. 3

    Findings and a firm quote

    What failed, what's recoverable, and a fixed price. You approve or decline - if you don't go ahead, the assessment fee is all you've spent.

  4. 4

    Your photos come back, verified

    Returned on new media, organised the way they came off the card, with the shots you told us mattered most checked first. Held on encrypted storage until you confirm you have everything.

Doing this since
2016
Background
Board-level
Diagnostic assessment
from $230
Courier option
NZ-wide

Memory card recovery in Auckland - and NZ-wide by post

The lab is at 213 Dominion Road, Mount Eden, Auckland 1024. Ring the lab and we'll tell you when to bring it in. Everything on this page is SD card data recovery NZ customers can post in: one Auckland bench, one set of hands, wherever the card came from.

Everywhere else: cards are the easiest thing on this site to send. Put the card in its plastic case or an anti-static bag first - never bare, where static and tape can reach the contacts - then tape that inside a rigid envelope or small box so it can't slide about. Use a tracked courier, and include a note with your name, number and what happened.

The full courier process

What SD card data recovery costs

Every job starts with the diagnostic assessment, from $230. Recovery is quoted after diagnosis, because a deleted-photo recovery from a healthy card and chip-level work on a snapped monolithic microSD are completely different jobs. Firm quote before any recovery work, always - and on cards especially, an honest word about whether it's worth proceeding.

Full pricing and the reasoning behind it

What the assessment fee buys you

  • What failed, and whether the card can be read
  • What's recoverable - and what isn't
  • A firm, fixed quote for the recovery
  • The decision stays yours - no pressure

If you'd rather not go ahead, that's fine - you'll know exactly what you're dealing with, and the assessment fee is all you've spent.

Why Kiwi Data Recovery for memory cards

Since 2016, with a board-level electronics background - and memory cards are where that matters most, because when a modern card stops responding, the only way in is at chip level under a microscope. Everything happens in-house in our Auckland lab: your card isn't posted on to a third party, your photos are handled by the people you actually talk to, and when a card is beyond recovery you'll hear it straight, with the reason.

Recent recoveries from the lab

SD & memory card data recovery FAQs

Straight answers to the card questions we're asked every week.

How much does SD card data recovery cost in NZ?

The diagnostic assessment is from $230, and the recovery is quoted after diagnosis - a straightforward deleted-photo recovery and chip-level work on a broken monolithic card sit at very different points on the scale. You'll have a firm, fixed quote before any recovery work starts. Because cards are low-value items holding high-value photos, we'll also tell you honestly on the phone when the assessment isn't worth it. Details on the pricing page.

I deleted photos off my SD card. Can they be recovered?

Usually, yes - and this is the one device where the honest answer is optimistic. Memory cards generally don't purge deleted data by themselves, so the photos typically stay on the card until something writes over them. The whole outcome depends on what you do next: stop using the card immediately, and don't keep shooting to "test" it.

I formatted the card by accident. Is everything gone?

Usually not. A camera's format is normally a quick format - it clears the index rather than erasing every image - so the photos are often still there. The exception is a deliberate low-level or full format, which some Canon and Panasonic bodies offer as a tick-box in the same dialog, and which Windows performs when you untick "Quick Format". Take the card out and leave it alone; anything written since the format is what eats into the odds.

My camera says the card needs formatting. Should I let it?

No. That message almost always means the filesystem is damaged, not that your photos are gone - and formatting is the one action most likely to make a recoverable card unrecoverable. Say no, eject the card, and get it looked at.

Can you recover data from a snapped or water-damaged card?

Often. A broken card isn't automatically a lost card - what matters is whether the memory itself survived, and on modern monolithic cards it frequently does even when the outside is destroyed. Keep every fragment, don't dry it in rice, and get water-affected cards in quickly before corrosion sets in.

Should I try recovery software first?

For a simple deletion on a card that still mounts normally, good software genuinely can work - take a sector-by-sector image of the card first and run the software against the image rather than the card, and never write recovered files back onto the same card. But if the card won't mount, reports the wrong capacity, was physically damaged or has been wet, software can't fix any of that and every scan is more time the card spends powered up. Ring us before you try.

My card came out of a drone, GoPro or dashcam. Same thing?

Yes, and we see plenty of all three. Dashcams and security recorders are worth a special mention: they loop-record by design, so they overwrite their own footage continuously. If a clip matters, pull the card out of the device immediately - every extra minute of recording is writing over what you want back.

Do you recover CFexpress, XQD and CompactFlash?

Yes - alongside SD, microSD, Memory Stick, xD and MMC. These are built differently to SD cards: they use separate controller and memory chips, and CFexpress in particular behaves more like a small SSD, so recovery often depends on the card's own controller still working. That makes assessment more important, not less. Bring the card, and mention the body it came from.

The photos are for a client. How is confidentiality handled?

Your card stays in our Auckland lab, work is done in-house by the people you deal with directly, and files are viewed only as far as verifying the recovery requires. Recovered data is held on encrypted storage until you confirm you have it, then securely erased.

How long does memory card recovery take?

Assessment timeframes depend on the card and what's in the queue, so we'll give you a realistic one when you book. Straightforward logical recoveries can be quick; monolithic chip-level work takes longer, because the read is only the beginning and the reconstruction is the real job.

Start with an answer

Deleted, formatted, snapped or simply refusing to mount - if the photos on that card exist nowhere else, the next step is a proper diagnostic assessment, from $230, and a firm quote you're free to say no to.

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In Auckland: bring the card into the lab. Anywhere else in NZ: post it to us - ring first and we'll tell you how to pack it.