Initial Cause of Data Loss

A customer contacted us to help to recover data from her thumb drive – 8GB. It is a gift thumb drive that she got from a photography studio. She did not try and check if the thumb drive is working or not after she received the thumb drive, and recently when she connected to her MacBook, it is undetectable, she checked Disk Utility under her MacBook, undetectable too. She tried a different computer and a different port, but it is still the same. The thumb drive contains her actual day wedding photos. The wedding was a few months ago, and the photographer does not keep any backup anymore, this is the only copy, and he is unable to reshoot the photos.

Thumb Drive Data Recovery

EHDR’s data recovery specialist dismantled the thumb drive for assessment and there is no physical damage or crack found on the thumb drive, the temperature is normal too. The thumb drive stopped working likely to the chip of the thumb drive being degraded and faulty. Chip-off recovery is required to extract all the RAW data from the memory chip of the thumb drive, and extracted data needs to be decoded to be valid readable files.  

Data Recovery Outcome

We have successfully extracted the data from the memory chip of the thumb drive, but the quality of the memory chip is too poor, despite several attempts, there are still a lot of incorrect data. Some of the photos are recovered, and some are corrupted. We helped her to do a photo file repair and rework, and after 2 weeks, we managed to get a much better result, the quality and resolution aren’t the best as original jpg or RAW photo files, but at least the photos are viewable. She is happy with the result of the recovery.

Suggestion

If you have received a free gift thumb drive, try not to store important files/data on it as the memory chip used for free gift thumb drives is usually poor and some are refurbished chipsets. They don’t last a long time and most of them will start to issue after some usage. If you have corrupted files like documents, photos, videos, or database, and if the condition allows, a repair can be done to make the data works again.

EHDR, We Leave No Data Behind!

More Success Stories>>>>>>