An accidental format feels like total erasure — the drive reports empty, the card shows zero photos, the folders are simply gone. Mechanically, though, a quick format writes only a fresh, blank index over the old one. The book kept every page; it just got a new cover claiming there’s nothing inside. Recovery is reading past the cover.
A quick format — the default nearly everywhere, and the only kind cameras perform — replaces the file table and touches nothing else: recovery prospects are excellent. A full format on modern Windows additionally writes zeros across the drive, which is genuinely destructive to whatever it covered — though interrupted full formats stop mid-disk, leaving everything beyond the stop line intact. Not sure which ran? The speed tells you: seconds-to-a-minute was quick; an hour-long progress bar was full.
Either way the response is identical: nothing new gets written to that device from this moment.
The wrong drive letter picked in a two-disk moment. The “format now?” prompt on a glitching external, accepted at midnight. The card formatted in-camera on the smug assumption everything had copied across. The clean OS reinstall that quietly repartitioned the data disk too. No judgement — the interface design practically farms these accidents — and all four leave the same recoverable landscape underneath.
The reinstall variant carries one extra wrinkle: the new OS wrote real data as well as a new index, so results are strong but partial, mapped honestly at assessment.
From a read-only image, we hunt the previous file system beneath the new one — old NTFS, FAT or exFAT structures frequently survive nearly whole under a quick format, restoring the original tree with names and folders. Where the old index is beyond reach, signature carving rebuilds the files themselves from their raw patterns. Photos, documents, video: back out from under the blank cover, verified before you pay.
Memory cards and USB sticks are a fixed £250 + VAT; single drives of any kind are £300 + VAT. Chip-level exceptions are named and quoted before anything is attempted. Everything starts with a free diagnostic, the figure goes in writing before work begins, and on most jobs nothing is owed unless the data comes back. No hourly meter, no evaluation fee, no percentage of what the files are worth.
Excellent, if it stops now — a quick format twenty minutes ago plus nothing written since is close to the ideal case, and the original file tree often returns intact. Unplug it, don’t “test” it with a few files, and get it imaged. The files-copied-on-to-test are the ones that land on your data.
Almost always — in-camera formats are quick formats, writing a tiny fresh index and leaving every frame where it was. Retire the card immediately: the danger isn’t the format that happened but the next photos taken over the top. Carved back from an image, formatted-card shoots are one of our most reliable jobs.
Two layers now: whatever originally made the drive unreadable, plus the fresh format on top. Still very workable — the format is the thinner layer — but the underlying fault means the drive gets treated as a hardware patient first: imaged gently, then both layers unpicked on the copy. Stop offering it to Windows.
Yes, and it’s worth knowing: formatting an SSD typically triggers TRIM, which starts erasing the freed flash in the background. Speed matters far more than on a hard drive — powered down within minutes, prospects can still be good; left running for days, honestly reduced. We’ll assess it free and give you the real picture.
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 anywhere in the UK. The work is done in-house by our own engineers, with a documented chain of custody, and your data never leaves the UK.
Nothing written since the mistake means nearly everything still there to find. Formatted media recovery for Glasgow — drives, cards and sticks, read past the blank cover and returned checked. Charing Cross or insured post, free look first.