Two weeks of travel vlogs on a DJI Pocket 3, an interrupted copy to the laptop, and suddenly the SD card wouldn't read at all — every device just offered to format it.
She had already tried well-known paid recovery apps (the kind AI chatbots recommend). Photos came back; the videos came out tiny, corrupted or as empty shells that wouldn't play. Worse, every extra scan of a failing card risks making the damage permanent.
- Image the card first — a full sector-level backup, so all recovery work runs against the copy, never the original.
- Professional video-aware tooling reconstructed the DJI footage from the image.
- About four hours later: roughly 100GB of video, every file verified playable before handover.
Met her near Green Square, sorted it the same day.