Data gone? We get it back.
Hard drive, SSD, memory card or smartphone — we recover your data in our in-house clean room in Frankfurt. Nothing is forwarded, nothing goes abroad. The diagnosis tells you what is possible.
Our diagnostic tariffs.
You set the pace. Shipping both ways is included in every tariff — from Standard upwards we collect from you. And you always get a written quote before we start the recovery.
Economy
0 €
free diagnosis
- Diagnosis
- approx. 5 working days
- After approval
- Regular queue
- Updates
- By email
Written quote · free shipping both ways
Standard
99 €
incl. VAT · per medium
- Diagnosis
- within 2 working days
- After approval
- Scheduled with priority
- Updates
- Email and phone call
Written quote · free collection and return
Emergency
249 €
incl. VAT · per medium
- Diagnosis
- next working day
- After approval
- Moved to the front
- Updates
- Named contact
Written quote · express collection and return. Arrives before 12 noon: diagnosis the same working day.
The Economy diagnosis is free of charge. With Standard and Emergency the diagnostic fee applies even if you decline the quote — it is not offset against a later recovery. Either way, you decide freely after the quote whether we continue.
From symptom to cause.
Nobody searches for a fault pattern. You hear a noise or read a message — and the most pressing question is: may I switch the device on one more time? Usually the answer is no.
Symptom
Clicks or ticks in a rhythm
Likely cause
The read head can no longer find its track and is repeatedly returned to its starting position. Typical after a drop, but also with wear on the head stack.
What to do now
Switch off immediately and leave it unplugged. Every further start-up attempt drags the heads across the platter again — a head fault turns into surface damage.
Hard drive →Symptom
Beeps, hums, does not spin up
Likely cause
The heads are stuck to the platter or the spindle motor is blocked. The drive tries to start turning and cannot.
What to do now
Cut the power. Do not shake it, do not tap it, do not freeze it — the heads can only be released from the surface under visual control and with the right tools.
Hard drive →Symptom
Grinds or scrapes
Likely cause
Head crash: the head touches the magnetic layer and wears it away. The debris spreads inside the drive and damages further tracks.
What to do now
Switch off, now. This is the one fault pattern where seconds of runtime make the difference between recovery and total loss.
Hard drive →Symptom
Spins normally but is not recognised
Likely cause
Usually the firmware area is damaged — the part of the drive where it keeps its own administration. A fault on the circuit board looks the same from the outside.
What to do now
No repair tools and no initialisation. The drive is mechanically fine; access is being refused by its own firmware.
Hard drive →Symptom
Wrong size or an unfamiliar model name
Likely cause
The controller has lost its translation table and reports a factory identity. On SSDs, memory cards and USB sticks this is by far the most common fault pattern.
What to do now
Do not format and do not initialise. The memory is almost always intact — only the route to it is missing.
SSD →Symptom
Windows or macOS wants to format it
Likely cause
The file system’s administrative structure is damaged. The operating system finds no valid table of contents and therefore suggests creating a new one.
What to do now
Decline and unplug the drive. The files themselves are almost always still there in full — only the directory is missing.
Memory card →Symptom
Gets hot, disappears after seconds
Likely cause
A component in the power supply has shorted. The drive briefly registers and then drops off.
What to do now
Do not plug it in again. Every attempt drives current through the faulty component and can take neighbouring traces with it.
SSD →Symptom
After a drop or contact with liquid
Likely cause
With liquid, corrosion starts immediately and continues underneath the components even when everything looks dry on the outside. After a drop, the mechanics or the solder joints are affected.
What to do now
Do not switch on, do not charge, do not use a hairdryer, do not put it in rice. Voltage on a wet board accelerates the decay considerably.
Smartphone →Symptom
File deleted or volume formatted, device runs normally
Likely cause
A logical fault. On hard drives and memory cards the data is usually still complete; on SSDs and modern smartphones it often is not.
What to do now
From now on write nothing to the medium — do not even install recovery software on it. Every write can hit exactly the blocks that matter.
File system or raw data →Symptom
NAS reports “Volume Crashed” or a drive has failed
Likely cause
At least one member of the array is missing, the redundancy is used up, or the array’s administrative data is damaged.
What to do now
Do not under any circumstances start a rebuild. Shut the system down, label the bay order, remove the drives one by one.
RAID & NAS →
Almost any storage medium.
Hard drive (HDD)
Logical error or physical damage — including head crashes, handled in the clean room.
SSD
Formatted, deleted or with a faulty controller.
Memory card
SD, microSD and CF — after a drop, water damage or formatting.
Smartphone
iPhone and Android — including after water or electronics damage.
USB stick
Snapped-off connectors, faulty electronics, deleted data.
RAID & NAS
Multiple drives, failed arrays — on request.
Details for your storage medium.
Hard drive / HDD
We have already recovered hundreds of thousands of gigabytes from faulty hard drives — in our own clean room lab in Frankfurt, with a diagnosis before the recovery and your approval before anything happens.
Mehr erfahren
SSD
We recover data from logically and physically damaged SSDs of all kinds — using techniques that go far beyond ordinary data recovery software.
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Memory card
Photos and videos often carry irreplaceable memories. When a memory card fails, we recover the data — with technology far beyond standard software.
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SanDisk
Every day we recover data from faulty SanDisk SSDs, flash drives and memory cards — reliably and cost-effectively.
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Western Digital
Every day we recover data from faulty Western Digital hard drives, SSDs and NAS systems — with the necessary knowledge and the right technology.
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Smartphone & tablet
A smartphone that no longer starts is rarely a smartphone with destroyed memory. Usually only the route to it is missing — and that is what we restore on the logic board.
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USB stick & flash drive
The USB stick is the medium that most often dies mechanically — bent in a laptop, torn off in a bag. The memory almost always survives it.
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RAID, NAS & server
A RAID survives the failure of one drive. What it often does not survive is the attempt to recover from it. Please do not start a rebuild.
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Mac & PC
A computer that no longer starts is not a computer with lost data. In most cases the storage is untouched — nobody can simply reach it any more.
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Encrypted drives
Encryption protects your data from us as well. That is not a shortcoming but the point of it. For a data recovery it means: we bring the hardware back, you bring the key.
Mehr erfahren
Crypto wallet
Recover a wallet from a phone, computer, drive or hardware wallet — you only pay if we succeed.
Mehr erfahren
Passware licences
We are a Passware partner and source the decryption software we work with ourselves — for investigators, authorities and corporate IT.
What happens to your drive.
The most important point is the fifth: after the image has been taken, we work exclusively with the copy. The original is never written to — not even when an attempt fails and we start again.
- 01
Send it in or drop it off
Order online and ship it insured — both directions are included in every diagnostic tariff. Or drop it off in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen without an appointment.
- 02
Intake and visual inspection
We record the drive with its serial number, document its condition on arrival and assign it to your job. From here on it stays in the lab.
- 03
Diagnosis
We determine the fault pattern — mechanics, electronics, firmware or file system — and establish which route is possible. Nothing is changed in the process.
- 04
Quote and approval
You receive in writing what the recovery costs and what can realistically be expected. Nothing continues without your approval.
- 05
Image first, then work on the copy
Before anything is reconstructed we create a sector-by-sector copy. Every further step runs on that copy. The original is not written to — not even when an attempt fails and we start again.
- 06
Return and deletion
The recovered data comes back on a drive in the parcel or via an encrypted download. Once you confirm receipt, we delete our working copies completely.
Before you do anything.
Almost every well-meant reflex makes the damage worse. That is why you find not only the rule here but also the reason — nobody follows an instruction without one.
In Frankfurt. Never outsourced.
Every recovery runs in our own clean room lab in Frankfurt — with microscopes, microsoldering equipment and a CT scanner. Your data is stored exclusively on our encrypted server and completely deleted after handover.
Equipment we use
The rules — and why they exist.
Cut the power immediately and leave it that way.
As long as a faulty drive is running, the damage keeps working. This is the one measure that helps with every fault pattern.
Do not switch on and off repeatedly to “check whether it works again”.
With mechanical damage, every start-up attempt drags the heads across the surface again. With electronic damage, every attempt drives current through the faulty component.
No chkdsk, no “repair drive”, no fsck.
These tools write. They rebuild the administrative structure on the basis of already damaged information and in doing so overwrite exactly the references from which the files could otherwise still be reconstructed.
No recovery software on a drive that makes noises, gets hot or disappears.
Such programs read block by block from front to back and keep weakened mechanics under continuous load for hours. They are made for healthy hardware with a logical fault — not for broken hardware.
Never confirm a prompt to format, and do not initialise.
“The drive needs to be formatted” only means that the table of contents is unreadable. Formatting creates a new one — on top of the old one.
Do not open the drive yourself.
The read head of a hard drive floats a few nanometres above the platter. A speck of dust is many times that. Anything opened in ordinary room air is as a rule harder to recover afterwards than before.
Do not unscrew the board from an identical drive.
Modern hard drives store their individual calibration values in a chip on their own board. Without transferring those values the drive does not become readable — and the firmware area can take additional damage.
No rice, no hairdryer, no oven, no freezer.
With liquid damage the problem is not the moisture but the corrosion it sets off — and that continues underneath components and shielding, where neither rice nor warm air ever reaches. Cold creates additional condensation when thawing.
With RAID and NAS, do not start a rebuild and do not swap drives.
A rebuild reads every remaining drive in one go for days. Devices from the same production batch tend to fail together under that load — and the newly calculated redundancy overwrites the old one.
On a smartphone, no factory reset and no firmware flash.
Modern devices encrypt every file individually. A reset destroys the key material — the data is still there afterwards, but nobody can read it any more.
Write down what happened.
Drop height, contact with liquid, power failure, which software has already run: that determines the route we take in the diagnosis — and what we will not even attempt.
With several drives, label the bay order.
The position in the enclosure determines the order within the array. If it is known, the reconstruction is considerably shorter.
Check whether a backup exists after all.
Cloud recycle bin, an old backup drive, photos on a second device. A recovery that is not needed is the best recovery.
Because dust is an order of magnitude too large here.
The read-write head of a hard drive does not touch the platter. It floats on a cushion of air generated by the rotation — the gap is in the single-digit nanometre range. For comparison: a smoke particle is a few hundred nanometres, a speck of dust several thousand.
So anything that gets between head and platter is not flown over but rammed. That is why a drive opened in ordinary room air usually does not get better but worse — the damage occurs at the next spin-up, when the head pushes the foreign body across the surface.
Our clean room is designed to ISO 5 — the class formerly called “Class 100” under the US standard. That class allows at most 3,520 particles of half a micrometre and above per cubic metre of air. Ordinary office air is several orders of magnitude above that.
A clean room is not a prestige object but the precondition for a head swap to make sense at all. Ours is in-house, in Frankfurt — drives are not passed on and do not go abroad.
- Head swap: the damaged head stack is replaced with a matching one from a donor drive.
- Platter work: platters are cleaned or — if the mechanics are destroyed — transferred into a prepared drive.
- Afterwards the drive is not “used again” but read out: it runs only as long as the image requires.
Clean room class
ISO 5formerly “Class 100” under the US standard
At most 3,520 particles of 0.5 µm and above per cubic metre of air. This is the class in which hard drives may be opened without the air itself becoming an abrasive.
Not every case can be recovered.
We do not quote a success rate. Without the distribution of fault patterns behind it, such a figure is worthless, and it does not help you with your drive. What does help: knowing when the effort is pointless from the outset.
Deleted on an SSD
When you delete, operating systems tell the drive which blocks are free. The controller clears them in the background on its own. Once that has happened the memory returns nothing but zeros — and there is nothing left to read.
Factory reset on a smartphone
Current devices encrypt every file individually. A reset does not delete the data but the key material. Physically everything is still there and nevertheless unreadable.
Encrypted without a key
BitLocker or FileVault can be opened with a recovery key or password — without one they cannot. We repair the hardware; encryption stays encryption.
Destroyed secure element
If the chip that holds a device’s key is destroyed, the key is gone. Reading the memory then yields nothing but ciphertext.
Overwritten
Where new data sits, the old data no longer does. That is why the most important piece of advice is also the simplest: stop using the drive after the loss.
Severely damaged magnetic layer
Where the coating has been worn away over a large area there is no carrier left to read from. Most common cause: a clicking drive that was left running for hours.
How data recovery actually works.
No sales copy: the technology behind it, in plain language. Whoever understands what is happening inside their drive makes the first decisions better — and the first decisions are the ones that count.
First aid
First aid after data loss
The first few minutes decide more about a data recovery than everything that happens in the lab afterwards. Not because there is any rush — but because almost every well-meant reflex makes the damage worse.
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Fundamentals
File system or raw data recovery?
Two recoveries of the same scope can lead to very different results: in one case the complete folder structure with names and dates, in the other 40,000 consecutively numbered images with no context. The difference is not the effort involved but whether the file system was still readable.
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Before shipping
Sending in a storage device safely
A drive that survived the failure but not the journey is an avoidable loss. Packing is not a formality — one knock on the sorting belt can turn an electronics fault into a head crash.
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In the lab
Why hard drives are only opened in a clean room
The clean room is the picture every data recovery company shows. More interesting than the picture is the reason: the distances inside a hard drive are so small that ordinary room air acts as an abrasive.
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Understanding SSDs
Why deleted data on an SSD is usually really gone
The most widespread misconception in data recovery: “deleted is never really deleted”. For hard drives that is often true. For SSDs it usually is not — and the reason lies in the design of the memory itself.
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Encryption
Encryption and data recovery
Encryption protects your data from us as well. That is not a shortcoming but the whole point. For a data recovery it means: we repair the hardware, you bring the key.
All articles
When it is not only data at stake.
A confidentiality agreement before intake, a documented chain of custody, a named contact instead of a ticket number, encrypted return and proof of deletion. For servers, RAID arrays and everything that has to stay quiet.
Answered briefly.
What does data recovery cost?
We work with transparent fixed prices based on the fault pattern — depending on the medium from €99, €299 or €499; in cases of total damage individually. Before every recovery you receive a written quote and decide freely whether we continue.
Do I pay even if no data is recovered?
The Economy diagnosis is free — if you decline afterwards, no costs arise. With Standard and Emergency the diagnostic fee (€99 or €249) applies even if you decline; it is not offset against a later recovery. The recovery itself is only charged after your approval.
How long does it take?
Depending on the tariff, the diagnosis takes about 5 working days (Economy), 2 working days (Standard) or one working day (Emergency) — with Emergency, the same working day if the medium arrives before 12 noon. How long the recovery itself takes depends on the fault pattern and is stated in the quote.
Is my data safe with you?
Yes. We work in line with the GDPR, pass nothing on to third parties and never outsource. Your data is stored exclusively on our encrypted server and completely deleted after handover.
Can I send the medium in?
Yes. Shipping both ways is included in every diagnosis tariff; with Standard and Emergency we collect the medium from you. Or you come to our lab in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen without an appointment.
Data Recovery Professionals
A worldwide group of independent, owner-run data recovery companies. Members share methods from professional data recovery, forensics and software development — so on rare damage patterns the knowledge of the whole group stands behind your medium.
Every hour counts. Let us talk.
Bring the medium in or send it to us. The Economy diagnosis is free — you find out what is possible before anything costs money.