Photos from a memory card that survived two winters on the street

This story happened to Andy Ihnatko, a columnist for The Chicago Sun Times, when he walked through the Boston Public Garden. During the walk, the journalist noticed something glittering under his feet. It turned out to be a camera. In very poor condition:





The entire back panel was rust and corrosion. It did not make sense to save the camera, but you could try to save the memory card. He took it out of the camera and opened the flash drive with a knife.
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^{Camera found by Andy (photo by Andy)}

After cleaning the card with dirt from a toothbrush, he found an old card reader and inserted a USB flash drive into it, but nothing happened. The card was dead.


^{Memory card removed from the camera (photo by Andy)}

Then he decided to give it to the Boston data recovery company DriveSavers. A few days later, experts reported on how work is proceeding to recover data from a flash card. To start, they had to order spare parts. A few more days passed, and they achieved their goal by recovering more than 140 photos and 2 videos. Here are some of these frames:









According to a report by DriveSavers experts, the water has corroded the contacts between the memory of the card and the chips of USB controllers. Engineers cleaned the contacts and re-soldered them among themselves. They did this work in a “clean room”.

In addition to photo and video files, it was possible to restore the headers of documents that were once on the map, but which have been deleted for a long time. Unfortunately, the contents of these documents have been lost forever.


^{Memory card (photo DataSavers)}

The biggest surprise was that the camera, along with a memory card, lay in water and mud for about two years. The flash card suffered two complete freeze and thaw. Recent photos were dated June 24, 2010.

Since Andy Ihnatko was not the owner of this memory card, DriveSavers experts, following their security policy, retained all the recovered data and the storage media itself.

There are two excellent conclusions from this story:

• There is no limit to what a data recovery service from media can do, even if they have lain in terrible conditions for several years.
• Use the strap to not lose the camera!

Well, from the translator, let's add also conclusion No. 3: if you live not in Boston, but in Moscow, and want to repeat a similar trick with data recovery - contact the Storelab laboratory . We will cope not worse ;-)