Data recovery centre in Amsterdam

Hello all. My Fairphone 3 is water damaged and I failed to create a back-up before it became totally un-useable. I am waiting for my shipping label to see what the problem is but it is likely to be the motherboard. My question is, does anyone know of a place, preferably in Amsterdam, where it is possible to have another motherboard put into the phone so I can at least recover my data, wipe the phone and get it recycled? I went to one in Amsterdam Oost and they were very helpful but didn’t have Fairphone parts. Fairphone itself doesn’t do data recovery. Any leads would be much appreciated!

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Welcome to the Community Forum.

I am not sure if you are aware that the data you want to recover is stored on your current motherboard (the internal storage is unseparable from the motherboard) – so if the motherboard would be replaced, you still cannot recover your data.

Fairphone’s repair contractor in France can replace your motherboard, but as said above, it will come with a blank storage, and is quite expensive:

Recovery services exist that can retrieve data from defect phones, but you can expect these to charge 300 Euros (or easily more) in such cases (data recovery only, not repair of the phone).

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Just as a note. In future you could use an SD card formatted as portable wherein you can store much if not most of your data.

If you use an SD card ensure it formatted as portable, which is not encrypted. An encrypted SD card [Internal] cannot be read with a damaged or new motherboard

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Thanks for that, I’ll bear it in mind for my next phone.

Ok, that makes sense. But if the motherboard itself is not too damaged, it could be put into another Fairphone so I could retrieve the data that way, right? I think that’s what the person in the repair shop actually meant.

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Hello, welcome to the forum!

Maybe one of the Fairphone Angels?

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To not set high hopes here, in case the Angel has no spare unused FP3 I would doubt anyone would take out the motherboard of their daily driver…

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Thanks for mentioning the Angels - I just read a bit about them. Wonderful to know they exist! But how do I get in touch?

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