The context
Léa, a videographer in Mons, films in 4K with a DJI Mavic 3 drone. After a hard landing, the 256 GB microSD is no longer detected, neither by the drone nor by a reader. On it: 240 GB of 4K footage from a client shoot impossible to redo. No backup — the card was the sole medium in the field.
The difficulty is structural: modern microSDs are Monolith cards, where the controller and NAND memory are embedded in a single block of resin. You can't "desolder the chip" as on a classic card: there's no separate chip. You must reach the internal contacts through the resin.
The intervention
Diagnosis: controller non-functional, NAND memory apparently intact. The chosen route is the Spider Web technique, specific to Monolith cards.
- Partial decapsulation of the resin block to expose the internal traces linking the controller to the NAND.
- Locating and micro-soldered wiring of the contact points ("spider web") to read the memory directly, bypassing the dead controller.
- Raw read of the NAND pages, then software reconstruction of the translation table (reverse FTL) to reorder the data.
- Data carving by video signatures to rebuild the 4K files from the reassembled fragments.
The result
In four days, 240 GB of 4K video was recovered and returned on a new device, after VeriFiles approval. Nearly the entire shoot was usable. Cost: €320 excl. VAT, per the USB/card fee. Léa now uses two cards in rotation and offloads her footage every evening.