An Unlikely Tale Of A Soggy Camera Card

A South African couple have managed to retrieve, without the aid of any data recovery services, pictures from a memory card that was inside a digital camera which was dropped into the ocean as they returned from a holiday in New York in September 2008. En route to Southampton the camera fell overboard and disappeared forever, or so they thought!

In a bizarre and most unlikely story a Spanish Trawler man fished out the camera as part of its daily catch whilst off the Western Coast of Europe and was able to reunite the camera with the couple. The Spaniard who found the memory card inside the Nikon Digital Camera realised that five images were still viewable on the card and decided to try and trace the owners, which he duly did and he was able to reunite them with their card and images.

What he and the owners of the card don't know is that if the internal Flash NAND chips are not at all corroded by the salt water then there is no real reason why the entire card of pictures can't be recovered in full. Given the card was inside the camera the whole time then tree is no reason to assume that any real corrosion of the card had taken place. The fact that 5 images were retrieved from the card without any need to recover them means the card is likely to have many more images still stored on it. The reason only five images were viewable is that the PCB inside the card that houses the FLASH NAND Chips was corroded but not the chips themselves.

NUS Data Recovery have in the past recovered images from cards that have been lost at sea (whilst the owner was surfing) and washed as part of the daily laundry run, even put in the microwave by an absent mined person. In all cases the images / information on the card or devices were recovered in full and NUS Data Recovery are keen to get their hands on the card that fell into the Atlantic as they are convinced that they could recover more than the five images that are currently viewable on the card. They specialise in the recovery of Flash Media, whether it be a USB Memory Stick or a memory card from your camera.
 
(Story Source Daily Mail)

16, Feb, 2010