Video: Watch this crazy contraption recover photos from a broken micro SD card: Digital Photography Review

If you’ve ever had valuable images on a damaged memory card, you know the pain it is to try to recover lost images. Sometimes, special recovery software can bring back lost images. But what happens when that doesn’t work, and you involve professional data recovery experts?

As first reported on by PetaPixel, Polish company Enter Serwis shared a video on TikTok that offers a sped-up look at advanced data recovery. The technician could recover images that the user likely thought were lost forever using a Spider Board, a monolith recovery solution.

The technician strips the memory card down to its internal board and then attaches 25 special contacts directly to the memory card’s chip. Once the pieces are in place, the technician can bypass the card’s defective controller to recover the data.

Traditionally, recovery like this has been done by soldering wires, which is difficult. Plus, with soldering, there’s a risk of failure and further damage to the storage device. In this case, there’s no soldering, and the Spider Board promises a safe, no-risk recovery solution.

You can see the Spider Board for the PC-3000 Flash, which is what’s used in the TikTok video above, in action in a video directly from the manufacturer, ACE Lab.

ACE Lab describes Spider Board as ‘designed for connection to internal contacts of NAND-based Flash drives manufactured as single-package chips (monoliths).’ The adapter ‘consists of 25 universal contacts that support software configuration of their association with NAND interface signals in a corresponding task.’ The Spider Board is built upon a configurable Xilinx microchip. Its primary purposes are to read data from many monolith devices and work in a card adapter mode with mSD, SD, and eMMC devices.

While you can order a Spider Board for yourself, it’s $3,000 and designed for professional data recovery operations. However, the next time you fear your images are lost forever, it’s good to know that there are companies out there who may be able to help you with the aid of a Spider Board. Not all lost data may truly be lost.