I just learned something about SD cards, and I'm not happy

Even on my pc hard drive, I deleted a ton of files accidently. Ran "undelete" before doing anything else. Still, a bunch were unrecoverable, some just displayed part of the picture, most displayed some kind of icon meaning the file name was there but nothing was recovered. Fortunately I had most of them backed. Still, some pics were irreplaceable.

 

This seems like a stupid question, but did you check your trash?

 

I'll leave you to your broken little pokey thing, but unless you don't have room on your computer, I think it should treat USB and card reader slots just like another drive. No guarantees, but worth a peek.

 

In terms of potential for making a life altering mistake I would put messing with a light switch ahead of cleaning up a photo collection.

 

When I'm not playing the bass, I work in IT and support some users who use cameras on a daily basis, and I feel your pain, but have a recommendation for you on how to avoid losing any pictures in the future. It's a simple workflow I personally use when dealing with cameras and photos from SD cards, and it's really good for making sure that your pictures don't ever get deleted unless you're absolutely sure you want them gone.

1. Take your photos, preferably RAW + JPG.
2. Setup a directory on your computer in which you will work on and store your photos. I just use My Pictures, and you'll want to make a couple of folders. They will be:
   1. From Camera
   2. JPG Backups
   3. To Sort
   4. To Edit
   5. Final
3. Copy all of the photos on your camera to the From Camera folder. Once you've done this, safely remove the SD card from your PC. DO NOT FORMAT THE DRIVE IN ANY WAY UNTIL YOU'RE DONE WORKING ON THE PHOTOS. This will insure you always have a backup if something happens on your PC.
   
4. Copy or move all of your JPGs from the From Camera folder to the JPG Backups folder in a sub-folder with the date. Remove any you don't wish to keep
   
5. Copy or move all of you RAW images from the From Camera folder to the To Sort folder. From here, you can remove pictures you don't want.
   
6. Once sorted, move any photos you would like to edit to the To Edit folder, and any you don't can be moved to Final folder (or converted to JPG then moved to Final folder, depending on how you roll).
7. From here, it's as simple as editing, then saving all of your final copies to the Final folder. If anywhere along the way, you accidentally deleted some pictures, or something happened, then you'll still have your SD Card with all of the pictures still on it.
   
8. Once you're sure you're done, put your memory card back in the camera, and format it using the camera (Using the camera to format the SD is better then the computer, since it will do it exactly how it wants it formatted).

Sorry, that ended up being longer than I thought it would be... Regardless, I hope it helps someone. Keep on bassin' folks.

 

There are many weirdnesses about flash memory, for two reasons. First, memory is made random defects, and those have to be steered around by the device. Second, memory cells wear out over time, and so the data are shuffled around to balance the damage across the entire device. These things have to happen without burdening the host computer, so there's a microcomputer on the device itself, running its own software, and guess what, software sometimes has bugs.

For these reasons, I would not depend on any single memory device, much less a flash memory, for archival storage of data without a backup.

 

I use a small flathead screwdriver that fits in the release hole, it is the only thing that has released for me.
A third hand to pull the wire also helps sometimes. I hate them things.

 

Yep, i learned early to copy any removable storage before trying to work on the data it contained.

 

^ This. ^
Learned the hard way that anything unintentionally deleted from a computer HD will still be in the Trash (for recovery if necessary.) Doesn't happen that way working directly from SD cards or flash drives, in my experience. Hit delete on those and they're gone for good.

 

Back in 2003, I took my daughter (then 8) to Arizona for our vacation and I took lots of pictures of the amazing scenery everywhere, especially the grand canyon. Shot 4 rolls of 32 exp. film but the rest (about 400 shots) was digital to a flash card.

At the airport to go home, I had the flash card in my pocket so it wouldn't go through the detector but the screener made me put it through anyway. I made a very short and polite attempt to keep it from going through but this was too close to 9/11 and the guy glared at me so I shut up.

The machine ruined the flash card. It didn't just scramble the pictures but it made it so it couldn't be recognized at all and couldn't be reformatted.

I really wish I had those pictures, but I treasure the ones I have on film a lot more.

 

Hmm ... the recovery program I use has been very good at dredging out the lost files from formatted cards. Interestingly, the program name is "CardRecovery."

 

People laugh at me since I switched over to only using my cell phone camera and I sold my dslr. I love the photos it takes, it is the best cell phone camera on the market, Pixel 2 XL. One of the beautiful things about shooting with a phone is every shot is automatically uploaded to my Google account. I could not lose a photo no matter how hard I tried. And it makes the size of the SD card (and the SD card in it's entirety) unnecessary.