A photographer copied a new job onto a Lexar USB stick and realised, too late, that the previous shoot had been sitting on it. Recovery software found nothing he could use. The stick itself was perfectly healthy — which made this one of the hardest faults there is, and one of the few where we genuinely cannot promise an outcome before we look.
A photographer copied a new set of files onto a Lexar USB stick and, in doing so, wrote over the previous shoot. Consumer recovery software found nothing usable. The stick was physically fine — no snapped connector, no dead controller — which meant this was never a hardware job. It was a question of what, if anything, survived underneath.
This is the fault we are least able to promise anything about, and it is worth saying so plainly. Deletion removes the signpost; the data sits there until something lands on top of it. Overwriting is the something landing on top. Whatever was physically replaced is gone — not hidden, not encrypted, gone — and no laboratory on earth reads a sector that has been written over. The only question worth asking is how much of the old shoot the new files actually covered.
The stick was write-blocked and imaged in full, and everything afterwards ran against that copy. Where a controller is healthy, as here, the flash can be read through it; where it is not, the raw NAND is read directly with our chip-level equipment and reconstructed around the wear-levelling and scrambling the controller would normally handle. Either way, the goal is one clean image before anything else happens.
From that image the recoverable frames were carved by signature — JPEG and RAW files identified by their own headers and structure rather than by a file system that no longer described them. Flash devices spread files across cells and rarely overwrite neatly, which is exactly why partial recovery is possible at all: the new shoot did not land on the old one evenly. Some frames were untouched. Some were half-buried and could be repaired. Some were simply gone.
A substantial majority of the original shoot came back: full-resolution RAW and JPEG frames, recovered, opened and checked one by one before anything was returned. A minority did not, because the new files had physically replaced them. The photographer had enough to deliver the job without a reshoot, which was the point.
We could have quoted a comforting round number at the start. We did not, because on an overwrite nobody can honestly know until the image is carved. What we could promise was the free look first, and no fee if nothing came back.
If you have copied over the top of something, or formatted the wrong card, the single most valuable thing you can do is stop using the device immediately. Every further write is another frame you will never see again. Do not “have a quick look”, do not run a scanning tool, do not shoot anything else onto it.
Then let it be imaged. photo recovery on cards and sticks is one of the most common jobs we handle, and the free diagnostic will tell you what actually survived before you spend anything.