You shot the wedding. The card died. Or the drive clicks, or the catalog will not open the week the album is due. We get your files back, and then we set things up so it never happens again.
Photographers call us in a panic, so we keep this simple. Here is what we do and what it costs.
Free assessment first. $250 covers memory cards and SSDs up to 2 TB, and hard drives up to 500 GB, with up to 24 hours of imaging time. Larger or failing hard drives that need slow, careful imaging are $500. We quote before going past either limit.
A backup plan that matches how you shoot: card to working drive to archive to off-site, automated so it happens whether or not you remember.
Workstations, NAS and storage, Lightroom and Capture One catalogs, color-managed monitors, gallery delivery, booking tools, and the website. The IT department a one-person studio cannot hire.
A studio runs on terabytes of irreplaceable files, a laptop that is also the office, and a dozen subscriptions that each hold a piece of the business. Nobody teaches you to manage that in photography school, and the vendors are no help when the thing they sold you breaks the night before a delivery.
We have spent 18 years fixing exactly these problems, and we share a house with a working photographer, so we know what a lost card actually costs. The goal is simple: get you back to shooting, and build a setup that quietly protects everything from then on.
Stop using it. Do not format it, do not keep shooting on it, and do not run a recovery tool that writes to the card. Put it somewhere safe and get in touch. Most "format this card" errors are recoverable if nothing has been written since.
The assessment is free: we look at the device, tell you what we think is recoverable, and quote before touching anything. Standard recovery is $250 and covers memory cards and SSDs up to 2 TB, or spinning hard drives up to 500 GB, with up to 24 hours of imaging time included. Hard drives between 500 GB and 2 TB, or any drive that is failing and has to be imaged slowly, are $500. If a drive needs more time than that, we stop and quote the rest at $100 a day before continuing. You supply a destination drive, or we provide one at cost.
Clicking usually means a mechanical failure, which needs a clean-room lab rather than software. We will tell you that honestly at the assessment, help you choose a lab, and handle the catalog and restore once the data comes back.
Three copies, two kinds of media, one off-site. In practice: a fast working drive, a mirrored archive on a NAS or second drive, and an automated cloud copy of everything delivered to clients. We set it up, test a restore in front of you, and write down how it works.
Yes, across the Denver metro area. Recovery assessments and backup setups go better in person, and we can look at the whole setup while we are there. Farther away, we travel, and most backup setups can be done remotely.
Tell us what happened or what you are shooting and we will tell you what it takes to protect it.
