Four hundred frames from a Saturday wedding outside Ayr; a card that mounted fine that night and answered “card error” by Sunday breakfast. What the photographer did next — and didn’t do — decided everything.
The card reached us Monday morning, posted Special Delivery from Ayr with a note that read like a held breath. Critically, the photographer had resisted every tempting mistake: no reformatting when the camera offered, no free recovery apps, no repeated re-insertions “to check”. The card had been written to exactly once since the fault appeared — by nobody.
Consumer SD cards fail this way constantly: the controller’s internal bookkeeping — its map of which physical block holds which logical sector — corrupts, and the card either vanishes or reports errors on mount. The NAND itself, where the photographs physically lived, was healthy. The couple’s day wasn’t gone; the index to it was.
The card was imaged end-to-end in hardware that ignores the controller’s protests, and recovery ran on the copy: file-system reconstruction where the tables survived, signature carving for the RAW and JPEG pairs where they didn’t. Every recovered frame was then opened and verified — not just listed — because a wedding gallery with corrupt thumbnails is a promise half-kept.
All 412 frames verified intact — ceremony, speeches, the first dance, the marginal-light candids that make the album — delivered by download link within 48 hours and on an encrypted USB by post behind it. £250 + VAT, the card band, exactly as quoted. The photographer’s new workflow, adopted that week: dual-slot recording and cards retired after a season. The couple never knew.
Every write after the fault overwrites someone’s moment. Post the card in — £250 + VAT flat, free diagnosis first, frames verified before anything ships.