Services :: Data Recovery in St. Matthews

St. Matthews sends me some of the most varied data recovery work I see. The neighborhood’s mix of home offices along Westport Road, small businesses on Shelbyville Road, established families in Brownsboro and Graymoor-Devondale, and professionals working out of the Frankfort Avenue corridor means that no two cases look alike. One week it’s a failed laptop SSD from a freelancer’s home office. The next, it’s a stack of SD cards from a parent who filmed every school event for three years and accidentally reformatted the wrong card.

I’ve been handling these cases since 2006 — personally, in-house, with professional-grade imaging equipment. My lab is about 15 minutes east on Shelbyville Road, just past the Gene Snyder (I-265), at 800 Fossil Creek Court. I’m in St. Matthews regularly anyway — picking up espresso beans at Sunergos, grabbing lunch along Frankfort Avenue — so drop-off logistics are usually painless. Call me and I can often meet the same day.

When a Laptop SSD Fails and There’s No Backup

One of the more instructive cases I’ve worked involved a laptop that simply stopped booting. The owner assumed the hard drive had failed — a reasonable guess — but when I opened the machine, the internal drive turned out to be an M.2 SATA SSD. These fail less often than mechanical drives, but when they do, people tend to assume the data is gone for good. It usually isn’t.

I connected the SSD to my DeepSpar Disk Imager for a full diagnostic workup. The drive was damaged, but SSDs have built-in error correction that often keeps data readable — just slowly, and only if you have hardware designed to handle the delays and retries without overwhelming the failing controller. Consumer software can’t do this safely; it hammers the drive until it gives up entirely. My equipment is built for exactly this scenario: it throttles read attempts, monitors the controller’s behavior in real time, and adjusts strategy automatically.

After mapping the drive’s directory structure first (to prioritize actual user data over empty space), I ran multiple imaging passes across the occupied sectors. Hours later, the image was complete. Out of roughly 300 million sectors that needed reading, only 115 were unrecoverable. Virtually 100% of the client’s data came back intact. That laptop had years of work on it with no backup whatsoever.

Recovering a Loved One’s Digital Life

Some recoveries aren’t about business files or productivity — they’re about holding onto someone who’s gone. A client brought me a deceased parent’s older laptop, hoping to recover photos, messages, and anything else that might still be on the drive. Some of it had been partially scrubbed, and it wasn’t clear exactly what remained.

I started by running the entire drive through professional recovery tools — not just copying what was visible, but scanning the full disk for deleted files, orphaned data fragments, and anything matching specific search terms the client provided. Beyond the standard filesystem contents, I located compressed Apple iPhone backup archives embedded on the drive, which I extracted separately using specialized tools. Inside those backups: text messages, voicemail recordings, and photo databases that the client didn’t even know existed.

I sorted the recovered data carefully — existing files separated from deleted recoveries, string-matched results in their own folder, and the iPhone extractions broken out by backup date. The goal was to hand back something navigable, not a mountain of cryptically named files. That kind of attention to the human side of the work matters, especially when the data is irreplaceable for reasons that have nothing to do with money.

Phone Recovery: When the Screen Dies but the Data Doesn’t

Data recovery isn’t limited to hard drives and SSDs. I’ve recovered data from phones with completely shattered or inoperable screens — devices that look like they belong in a recycling bin but still have perfectly intact storage inside.

One case involved a Samsung phone with a screen so damaged that no touch input registered and nothing useful appeared on the display. I connected the phone to a recovery workstation, used a USB-C video adapter to mirror the screen externally so I could see what I was doing, then navigated through the phone’s security prompts to authorize data extraction. The entire contents — photos, contacts, messages, app data — were copied to a new flash drive in under an hour. The client had assumed everything was lost when the screen broke.

The trickiest part of phone recoveries is the security lockout: too many failed login attempts and the device wipes itself. That’s why it’s important to bring it in sooner rather than later, before well-meaning attempts to fix it make things worse. I handle Android devices; iPhones with hardware damage typically need Apple or a specialized mobile forensics facility.

SD Cards, Flash Drives, and the Footage You Can’t Reshoot

St. Matthews families and hobbyist videographers generate an enormous amount of data on removable media — SD cards from cameras, dashcams, action cams, and school events. When those cards get reformatted, corrupted, or simply stop mounting, the reaction is usually panic. Understandably so, because some of that footage can never be recreated.

I recently worked a case involving two 128 GB SD cards used to record youth soccer games. The client believed one of the cards contained specific game footage from a recent match — but the files had vanished. I imaged both cards through my DeepSpar USB Stabilizer with write-blocking enabled, then ran multiple recovery tools in parallel: UFS Explorer Professional Recovery for filesystem reconstruction and Klennet Carver for raw MTS video file carving. The investigation revealed that the missing footage had been on the same card as a later recording session, and the newer footage had overwritten the original video data. That’s a painful finding, but it’s an honest one — and it’s information the client needed. In cases where the original data hasn’t been overwritten, recovery rates on SD cards are typically excellent.

I also handle flash drives, CompactFlash cards, and any other solid-state media. The same professional imaging approach applies: write-blocked connection first, full forensic image, then logical recovery from the image — never from the original media.

How I Work and What It Costs

Every recovery starts with a free diagnosis. I connect your media to write-blocked professional equipment, assess the condition of the device, and give you a clear price before any recovery work begins. If I can’t recover your data, you owe nothing. That policy has been in place since 2006.

Logical recoveries — accidental deletion, reformatted drives, partition corruption on otherwise healthy media — start at $249. Most advanced recoveries involving mechanically failing or electronically damaged drives are $399, and the majority of all cases come in at $499 or less. RAID arrays are priced per drive. If the recovery requires new media for the returned data (a portable SSD, flash drive, etc.), I order it in your name at my cost. Zero markup on parts, always.

I own over $20,000 in professional recovery hardware: DeepSpar Disk Imager, DeepSpar USB Stabilizer 10 Gb, MRT Ultra, and professional-grade software including UFS Explorer Professional Recovery and R-Studio Technician. This is the same caliber of equipment used by national recovery labs that charge $1,000 or more. The difference is that I’m local, I’m the one doing the work, and my pricing reflects the fact that I don’t have a sales team, a call center, or a warehouse full of overhead.

Getting Here from St. Matthews

Two easy routes. The most direct is Shelbyville Road east — straight through Middletown, past the Gene Snyder Freeway (I-265). My lab is just past the Snyder on the south side, in the Landis Lakes area near Lake Forest. About 15 minutes from the heart of St. Matthews, depending on traffic at the Snyder intersection.

If Shelbyville Road traffic is backed up (it happens), hop on I-64 east to I-265 south. Exit at Shelbyville Road and turn east (left). I’m about three minutes from that exit. Parking is right at the door — no shared lot, no walking across a strip mall. You pull up, hand me the drive, and we talk through the situation.

What I Won’t Do — and Why That Matters

If your drive has suffered a catastrophic head crash, a motor seizure, or platter scoring that requires cleanroom disassembly and physical component replacement, that work is beyond what I do in-house. I’ll diagnose the problem, explain exactly what’s happening, and refer you to a reputable lab — not just any lab, but one I trust to do the work fairly. I’ll also help you understand what a reasonable price looks like so you don’t get taken advantage of by a national chain quoting $2,000+ for a $600 procedure.

I handle everything up to that cleanroom threshold: firmware-level imaging, unstable mechanical drives, failing SSDs, corrupted RAID arrays, encrypted volumes (with your key), phones, flash media, and multi-source logical recoveries. The vast majority of cases that walk through my door are recoverable without cleanroom work — and for those, you won’t find better-equipped or more experienced help anywhere in Louisville.

Fifteen Minutes from St. Matthews, Nineteen Years of Results

If you’re in St. Matthews and dealing with data loss — whether it’s a failed hard drive, a dead SSD, a broken phone, or a reformatted SD card — call me at (502) 233-4393. I’ll assess the situation at no charge, give you a straight answer about what’s possible, and recover what can be saved. Every case gets a written service report documenting exactly what was done, what was found, and what was recovered. Over 6,000 clients and nearly two decades of this work, and roughly 75% of my business still comes from direct referrals. That doesn’t happen unless the results consistently speak for themselves.