Strip away the plastic and a USB stick is barely three parts: a connector, a small controller, and one black NAND chip where every file actually lives. That anatomy is the whole recovery story — because connectors snap and controllers die constantly, while the chip itself is stubborn. If the NAND survives, and it nearly always does, your files are a bench job away regardless of what the rest looks like.
The classic Glasgow casualty: a stick left in a laptop’s port and caught by a bag, a knee, or gravity. The connector shears or the board cracks, and the stick is mechanically dead — but the chip a centimetre behind the break is untouched. Recovery is micro-soldering where the traces allow, and reading the NAND directly where they don’t. Keep every fragment, however small; a cracked board recovers far better than a missing one.
What doesn’t help is a repair attempt with a household iron. Heat in unpractised hands lifts the pads the recovery needs.
The other family has no visible injury: the stick that suddenly draws power but never appears, enumerates as an unnamed device, or invites Windows to format it. That’s the controller failing or the flash developing errors past what the controller can hide. Software cannot reach behind a dead controller — the fix is reading the NAND itself and rebuilding your files from the raw dump, unscrambling the controller’s wear-levelling in software.
Monolith sticks — the tiny ones where connector, controller and flash share a single sealed blob — are the hard mode of this work, read through test points instead of chip legs. Slower, fiddlier, and still very much recoverable.
Nobody recovers a USB stick for the hardware. It’s the dissertation with no other copy, the site photos from a finished job, the folder that was “just temporary” for four years. The maths is simply the value of the files against a fixed £250 — and the free diagnostic exists so you can make that call knowing what’s actually recoverable, not guessing. If the answer is “not worth it”, that costs you nothing but the postage back.
USB sticks and memory cards are a fixed £250 + VAT, including snapped connectors and chip-level reads. The rare monolith exception is quoted in writing before anything is attempted. Every job starts with a free diagnostic and ends the same way it was quoted: the figure goes in writing before a single sector is read, and on most jobs there is nothing to pay unless your data comes back. No hourly meter, no surprise “evaluation fee”, no percentage of what the files are worth.
Almost always — the break is nearly always at the connector or board edge, and the NAND chip carrying your files sits behind it undisturbed. Collect every piece, tape nothing, solder nothing, and send the lot. Chip-level reads recover snapped sticks routinely, even the ones in several parts.
No — cancel that dialog every time. It means the file system the stick presents is unreadable, usually after a mid-write removal or early controller trouble; the files beneath are typically intact. Formatting writes a fresh, empty structure over the clues we use. Unplug it and leave it be until it’s diagnosed.
Helpfully, yes: most sticks don’t run the TRIM erasing that SSDs do, so deleted files sit recoverable until new data lands on top of them. The rule is simply to stop using the stick the moment you notice. Bring it in before anyone “tests” it by copying files on.
That’s exactly the question the free diagnostic answers — we’ll tell you what’s recoverable before any money changes hands, and if the honest answer is that the files aren’t worth the fee, we’ll say so. No fix, no fee applies as standard; nobody pays for an empty result.
Two honest routes, no vans. Hand the device in at Tay House, 300 Bath Street — right at Charing Cross, two minutes off the M8 — Monday to Friday, 9am–5:30pm. Or wrap it well and send it by insured, tracked post from Paisley, Ayrshire, the Highlands or anywhere else in the UK. Either way the work is done in-house by our own engineers, with a documented chain of custody, and your data never leaves the UK.
A thesis on a stick that broke in the port — and how the chip was read directly. Read it →
Bag every fragment, skip the DIY soldering, and let the diagnostic tell you what’s really recoverable — free. USB stick data recovery in Glasgow: over the counter at Tay House or first-class insured post from anywhere.