Data Recovery Case File · Solid State & Flash · His Arithmetic Found It

Some Files Left a Broken Placeholder and Others Left Nothing at All

His enquiry contains a count that does more work than any description could. Transferring images from a phone's internal storage to a card, "around half the images corrupted or broke. Some are now just grey boxes indicating error and some are not represented by anything and just appear missing — basically there's not enough broken images for those I know I have lost." Those two presentations are two different failures, and the numbers not matching is what proves it.

The decode: what each presentation means, and why the counts matter

What a grey error placeholder means: an entry exists. The system knows a file is meant to be there, has a name and a size for it, and cannot render what it finds — so content was written and it is incomplete or damaged.

What an absent item means: no entry exists at all. Nothing on the card records that the file was ever meant to arrive, which is a different event entirely — the transfer of that item never began, or began and was abandoned before anything was committed.

Why his arithmetic is the finding: if a single failure mode were responsible, every affected file would present the same way. He knows more images are missing than there are error placeholders, which means some items produced a broken result and others produced no result — two behaviours from one operation.

What that suggests about the transfer: it was not corrupting uniformly. It was aborting — running, writing partial content, stopping, and resuming, with some files caught mid-write and others never reached. That is the signature of a destination that kept dropping out rather than one that wrote badly.

Why a card is the likely point of failure: moving a large image library is sustained heavy writing, which is the heaviest demand most cards meet. Marginal cards fail during bulk transfers rather than during ordinary use, and half a library is a lot of writing.

Now the question that may matter more than any of this: was it a copy or a move? If the images were copied, the originals are still in the phone's internal storage — and that is where to look before anything is done to the card. Transfer tools default to copying more often than people assume.

What to check on the phone even if it was a move: the recently-deleted album, which retains items for around thirty days. A move that removed originals may have routed them there rather than removing them outright.

What must not happen: no further transfers to that card, and no formatting. Continuing to write to a destination that has already failed under load will complete what the first attempt started.

On the bench

Presentation counts were reconciled before any conclusion — an error placeholder indicating an entry exists with content written incompletely, while complete absence indicates no entry was created at all, so a mismatch between the counts establishes two concurrent failure modes rather than one. The source device was examined for retained originals before any card work, transfer operations defaulting to copying more frequently than assumed. Directory entries and content were assessed separately.

The outcome

The counts reconciled to identify two failures, the source device examined first, and entries assessed separately from content. Free assessment, one fixed written figure including VAT; where a chip has to be removed, 50% of parts and labour is payable upfront with the balance only on success — otherwise no recovery, no fee. The decode: your arithmetic found something. A broken placeholder means content arrived incomplete; an absent file means no entry was ever created — and the counts not matching proves both happened.

Our case files are drawn from genuine enquiries received by our laboratory over the past ten years, anonymised to protect client confidentiality. Each one describes the diagnostic and recovery procedure our engineers apply to that fault, using the equipment listed.