While we are able to recover data from the majority of scenarios, there are some situations where recovery is just not possible. Rather than only discuss the successes we have, we think it is important to highlight some of the repair and recovery attempts that are not successful.
Unfortunately, this was the case for a local customer with an iPhone XR that had been dropped in the ocean. The phone had stopped turning on and they needed to get photos recovered. We started work on the device right away by disassembling the board and checking for shorts with our DT880, multimeter, and thermal camera.
The board was in bad shape. Lots of shorts and obvious signs of damage from the saltwater. We decided that the best option for recovery, in this case, was to remove the NAND chip that holds the data and recover everything we could directly from the chip itself. This is known as a chip off recovery.
Once we had removed the chip we did a visual inspection and found that a hole was burned through the chip. This kind of short on the data chip made the recovery not possible. We explained that the damage was too great to pull data from the chip and the customer was disappointed but understood we did everything we could.
While we do have a high success rate, there are some situations, like this one, where recovery is just not possible. Note we usually only charge for the recovery if we are successful. There are some special cases where we will let you know if there will be a charge in order for us to attempt the recovery, but most of the time we only charge if we are successful in getting your data back.
If you have an iPhone that you need your data recovered from, please feel free to bring it in or ship it to us for recovery.