Water Damaged Device Data Recovery
Water, coffee, and other liquids damage devices through short circuits and corrosion, and corrosion keeps working after a device looks dry. The best thing you can do is keep it powered off and get it to a lab quickly. We recover water-damaged hard drives, laptops, and phones for one flat $1,200, and you pay nothing if we can't recover your data.
Signs of water damage
- •Got wet from a spill, flood, rain, pool, or toilet
- •Won't power on, or shut off right after getting wet
- •Turns on but behaves erratically, restarts, or gets hot
- •Drive not detected or making new noises after a flood
- •White, green, or crusty residue on ports or the board
- •Fogging or moisture under a phone or laptop screen
What’s actually happening
Liquid causes two kinds of damage. The first is immediate: if a device has power when it gets wet, the liquid bridges circuits and can short out components. The second is slower: minerals and impurities in water, and the sugars and acids in drinks, start corroding the circuit board and connectors. Corrosion keeps spreading after the device seems dry, which is why time matters.
What's at risk depends on the device. In phones and most modern laptops, data lives on memory chips soldered to the main board, and many encrypt that storage with keys tied to the device's own hardware, so recovery usually means cleaning and repairing the original board enough to read it. On a hard drive, the external circuit board is usually the first casualty. Hard drives also have a small breather hole, and if dirty water got inside, the platters can be contaminated and need cleaning in a cleanroom before the drive is run.
SSDs, SD cards, and USB flash drives store data on flash memory chips, which often survive liquid exposure even when the controller or board around them doesn't.
What not to do
- ✕Don't turn it on or charge it to see if it works — powering a wet board is what causes most short circuits.
- ✕Don't dry it with a hair dryer, oven, or heater — heat can warp parts and push liquid deeper into the device.
- ✕Don't put it in rice — rice doesn't remove liquid from inside components, does nothing about corrosion, and can leave starch and grains in the ports.
- ✕Don't open a hard drive to dry it out — the inside of a drive should only be opened in a cleanroom.
- ✕Don't spin up a hard drive that sat in flood water — silt or debris inside can scratch the platters as soon as it runs.
- ✕Don't wait days to see if it recovers — corrosion keeps progressing, so ship it as soon as you can.
How we recover it
Assess and clean
Engineers disassemble the device, assess the liquid and corrosion damage, and clean the affected boards and components to stop further corrosion.
Device-specific repair
Phones and laptops with soldered storage get board-level repair so their own hardware can read and decrypt the data. Hard drives get board repair with the original ROM data preserved, and if liquid reached the inside, the drive is opened in a cleanroom so the platters can be cleaned and heads replaced as needed. Memory cards and flash drives may have their memory chips read directly when the controller is beyond repair.
Controlled imaging
Once the storage can be read, it's imaged with professional hardware that controls retries, so the recovery works from a copy rather than the damaged original.
Rebuild and verify
File systems are reconstructed from the image, and your files are checked to confirm they open before they're returned on a secure return drive.
Can the data be recovered?
Water-damaged devices are often recoverable, especially when they were powered off quickly and sent in without delay. The odds get worse with salt water, sugary drinks, or dirty flood water, when the device was powered on or charged while wet, and the longer corrosion has had to work. For phones and laptops with encrypted, soldered storage, recovery depends on getting the original board working, which isn't always possible if critical components are badly corroded. We'll know after diagnosis, and if we can't recover your data, you pay nothing.
Related guides
Water Damage — common questions
My phone dried out and turned back on. Am I in the clear?
Should I put my wet phone in rice?
Should I dry a wet hard drive before sending it?
Does it matter what the liquid was?
How much does water damage recovery cost?
Other failures we recover from
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