The most important thing right now:
Do not power the drone on. Remove the battery immediately. Do not reformat the SD card. Bring both the drone and the card in as soon as possible.
The first five minutes
- Remove the battery immediately — before anything else. Water and battery current cause corrosion and shorts. Get power out of the equation.
- Remove the SD card and put it somewhere safe and dry. Even if the drone is a total loss, the card may be fine.
- Do not power the drone on to check if it still works. Every time you power on a wet board you risk creating new failures and destroying data on any onboard storage.
- Do not shake water out violently. Gentle inversion is fine. Hard shaking can push water deeper into components and knock already-detached parts loose.
SD card vs internal storage — what you're actually dealing with
Most DJI drones record to a microSD card. Some models (Mavic 3, Mini 4 Pro, and others) also have internal storage that stores a lower-resolution copy. The recovery path is different for each.
SD card:If the card itself is intact — no physical damage, not reformatted, not overwritten — the footage is almost always recoverable. The card reader in the drone failing doesn't affect the data on the card itself. We read the card directly.
Internal storage: This is NAND flash soldered to the flight controller board. If the board has significant water damage, recovering internal storage requires board-level repair or chip-off recovery — more involved, but often still possible.
Why reformatting is fatal
When you format a card — even a quick format — the file allocation table is cleared or rewritten. The operating system treats all sectors as available. The next file written to the card can overwrite the footage you're trying to save.
Even viewing the files on a computer without copying them first can cause the operating system to write metadata, timestamps, or thumbnails. Best practice: do nothing with the card. Hand it to us in the same state it came out of the drone.
Drone repair and footage recovery are separate decisions
You don't have to repair the drone to recover the footage. If the drone is not worth repairing, we can still recover footage from the SD card and, in many cases, from the internal storage. Tell us when you bring it in what your priority is: footage, drone, or both.
If the footage is commercial work, a wedding, or anything irreplaceable, say so. It changes which path we take first.
When you don't need us
If the crash was on dry land with no water exposure, and the SD card is readable in a card reader, you can copy the files yourself with standard file recovery software (PhotoRec is free and works well for video files). Bring it in only if the card shows as unreadable or the files are corrupted.
Common questions
- Can footage be recovered from a drone that crashed in water?
- Often yes, if you don't power it on and the SD card isn't reformatted. Internal storage recovery depends on board condition and requires chip-off or board-level work.
- Should I power on my drone after it crashed in water?
- No. Powering on a wet drone causes additional short circuits and corrosion. Remove the battery immediately and leave it off.
- Why is reformatting the SD card fatal for footage recovery?
- Formatting overwrites the file allocation table and marks sectors as available for reuse. Once new data is written to those sectors, the original footage is gone.
- What is the difference between SD card recovery and internal storage recovery?
- SD card recovery reads the card directly — no drone repair needed. Internal storage is soldered to the flight controller and requires board-level recovery.