Card failure story?

[stevelee]

I've never had a card to fail. One precaution I take is to format the card in the camera where I am going to use it, and I don't write anything to the card from anything else. I don't know whether that helps, but it seems to make sense to do.

I have had a card not to work in a particular camera. Last fall I bought a G7X II for my travel camera before I left on a long driving trip through the Rockies that concluded with a swing through the Florida Panhandle and to Savannah and Charleston. (Didn't make much sense to me either, but my friend in OK wanted to visit those cities while we were out.)

Since I hadn't had much time with my new camera, I took along my venerable S120 as a backup. I never needed to use it on the trip, but it had a 32GB card in it that I was going to use when I filled up the one in the new camera. When the time came, that card wouldn't work in the new one, though it did fine in the S120. It wasn't ancient or offbrand, but must not have met the G7X's requirements. I didn't bother with researching, but just popped in a 4GB card I had along, and then bought an 8GB card at the park's visitor center, and added a 64GB card from the next Wal-Mart we encountered. All those RAW files wound up on my computer's SSD and presumably are backed up in Time Machine, and resultant JPEGs of my favorites are posted on line. If I lose any of the originals, I'm unlikely to miss them at this point.

 

[Aglet]

Was just working with an older camera I haven't used for 3 years...
Kingston SD card
Had trouble reading files off it. Got them all off, about 3 GB worth, but sometimes it seemed like it was struggling to read as the transfer rate was up and down a lot and it took nearly half an hour to transfer what should have only taken minutes.
New files written to the card read back quickly, as normal.
I don't think this brand uses ICs that are as good at maintaining their bit integrity for long periods of time.

 

[stein]

Had 2 x CF Lexar 128GB 800x failed, got them replaced and nothing since. BUT did a mess up with my friends camera, I put the SD sandisk 8 gb wrong way into the card reader and that destroyed the card.. Just twisted it 180 degrees.
Stein, Norway

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

I still have not tried to troubleshoot why my 5D MK IV locked up shooting the eclipse, but my new Lexar 128 GB CF card is definitely suspect. I restarted the camera, and it worked fine, but it may be writing to a different portion of the card after restarting.

I think I'll look into that.

 

[Aglet]

I still have not tried to troubleshoot why my 5D MK IV locked up shooting the eclipse, but my new Lexar 128 GB CF card is definitely suspect. I restarted the camera, and it worked fine, but it may be writing to a different portion of the card after restarting.

I think I'll look into that.

HATE when stuff like that happens!
i was in the middle of a big pano in fast changing sunset light with an old Rebel XSi bunch of yrs ago and same thing.... locked up in the middle of the shoot.
Had to pull the battery to get it to behave again and lost the magic light by the time everything was back together. Frustrating, but the only time it ever did that.

 

[Aglet]

Just had a Lexar Platinum II 16GB SD fail now..
Totally dead, no access. Likely wasn't anything critical on it or I'd have DL'd it immediately after shooting but lost a few hundred shots. Grrr. Very low use card.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

I still have not tried to troubleshoot why my 5D MK IV locked up shooting the eclipse, but my new Lexar 128 GB CF card is definitely suspect. I restarted the camera, and it worked fine, but it may be writing to a different portion of the card after restarting.

I think I'll look into that.

I did a complete low level format of the card using Lexar image rescue 5, 128GB takes about a hour. No issues found.

I'm still puzzled, I was controlling the camera via wi-fi and my iphone, so it would have been a wi-fi glitch. I was using camera settings previously setup in C2, so I can still replicate the settings, but time to move on.

 

[Perio]

I had one of my SD cards with tons of dental clinical photographs failed. The card stopped being recognized by the camera and my Mac laptop. Strangely, a few months later I purchased an iMac and it recognized the card right away.

 

[stevelee]

I've not ever had a card to fail, but I have encountered incompatibility.

Last fall before a trip through the Rockies, I bought a G7X II. I also took along my S120. I never needed to use the latter, but it had a 32GB card in it. So when I had filled the card in the former, I took the card out of the unused camera, but it was not recognized at all, so reformatting in the newer camera was not possible. I put the card back in the S120, and it still worked fine.

 

[9VIII]

The weird thing is that anyone working in IT would get fired the moment they suggest not having storage redundancy. If you care about data management then the idea of using a single card should be absolutely unacceptable.
Everything but the Powershot line should have dual slots.

At the very least if you can't run redundant storage in one device then you should have regular (ideally daily) backups to a separate storage device.
If you're on the road or actively shooting throughout the day, it would be nice to have a small device that does have two card slots so you could just stick the active card in and have it automatically copy everything for redundancy. I'm surprised no-one has created any kind of pocket sized "quick copy" systems.
The benefit of saving to a second card and not just a portable HDD is you would still have a second card if your first one fails.
I guess now that Canon's Blutooth connection allows browsing through the memory card and transferring pictures maybe that will be a good step forward. Hopefully they have an easy "download all" option.

 

[Aglet]

The weird thing is that anyone working in IT would get fired the moment they suggest not having storage redundancy. If you care about data management then the idea of using a single card should be absolutely unacceptable.
Everything but the Powershot line should have dual slots.

At the very least if you can't run redundant storage in one device then you should have regular (ideally daily) backups to a separate storage device.
If you're on the road or actively shooting throughout the day, it would be nice to have a small device that does have two card slots so you could just stick the active card in and have it automatically copy everything for redundancy. I'm surprised no-one has created any kind of pocket sized "quick copy" systems.
The benefit of saving to a second card and not just a portable HDD is you would still have a second card if your first one fails.
I guess now that Canon's Blutooth connection allows browsing through the memory card and transferring pictures maybe that will be a good step forward. Hopefully they have an easy "download all" option.

Actually, there used to be such similar devices quite a few years ago. Some with built in portable HDs and enuf smarts that you could choose to copy to HD or another flash device. I'd never used one but a pro photog buddy gave me his ancient one a few years ago but I didn't get a chance to play with it. I think that old one maxed out at 2GB card support anyway which is why he gave it to me to play with. I may still have that in a box somewhere... which I should contribute to a museum. LOL