Methods, systems, and machine-readable storage medium for multi- tier data recovery utilizing a series of progressively more complex detection and decoding modes based on data from additional pages or wordlines. In one aspect, read data is obtained from at least one cell comprising a given page of a flash memory, and reliability values are generated for the cell from the read data. The reliability values are utilized to decode the read data for the given page. If the decoding of the read data fails, a series of successive decoding steps is performed, with each successive decoding step utilizing additional read data to generate reliability values for the decoding. In one example, reads of one or more additional pages in the same wordline are performed. In a second example, several read retries (soft reads) of the same wordline are performed. In a third example, one or more additional neighboring wordlines are read.