Photoclubalpha

The worse of photographer's nightmares happened.

Friday night I was about to do a backup of the last two events I did during the week and something went wrong somewhere: the SD card didn't fit smoothly on the card reader. I inspected the card and it was physically damaged at the top, by the contact terminal... I tried with a different card reader and I this time the card mount on the computer. I start doing a backup and the process stopped at 1/3 of the first event. I couldn't read that folder anymore.

The folder with the second event was OK.

After secure the second event, I tried to read the card from the camera, but it was impossible to fit the card into the camera (the A99 or the NEX7) so I try a third card reader, but access to the damaged folder was impossible. Next step was the real mistake: I asked Windows to "fix" the card: the damaged folder disappeared!

Time for a software solution. Sandisk and Sony have recovery software for their cards. In this case, it was a Sony SD card, so I downloaded (http://www.sony.net/Products/memorycard ... index.html) and installed it. GB card took more than a couple of hours to get scanned and to recover all the files: 2000+ RAW images found, but the 200 that I was expecting didn't shown up.

Now I was in trouble. This situation never happened to me before. But I remember reading on the old Minolta group Forum in Yahoo of a software (free!) able to recover Minolta raw .MRW files. "Smart Recovery" from the German editor PC Inspector (http://www.pcinspector.de/SmartRecovery ... language=1) This is an old software, for WIN NT, XP and 2000, I installed it on my WIN 8 PC and after a couple of crashes, I asked Windows to run it as WIN XP. It worked.

Since you are supposed to search for file types, and the Sony ARW raw files was not in the list, I searched for TIF files. It worked! I start recovering files and soon, the missing files appeared. Slowly, the nightmare was over. The TIF files were perfect, no corruption at all, and Lightroom read them without problem, all the metadata was there.

I hope it will never happen to you, but just in case, get a copy of Smart Recovery -I'm not getting paid for this. Wait, I got blessed by them and I need to declare my gratitude

Regards.

Good info Pako, I used Sandisk's recovery software for a friend who had a PNY SD card stop working in the camera. Just came up with "unformatted card, please format" all the time and would not read in a reader. It recovered all the images (jpg). However it renamed all the files so the numbers do not match but at least he had them back. Told him to scrap the card and buy reputable brand.

Mike

mikeriach wrote:Good info Pako, I used Sandisk's recovery software for a friend who had a PNY SD card stop working in the camera. Just came up with "unformatted card, please format" all the time and would not read in a reader. It recovered all the images (jpg). However it renamed all the files so the numbers do not match but at least he had them back. Told him to scrap the card and buy reputable brand.

Mike

PNY is a reputable company. They are better know for RAM memory, but they also make memory cards.

The Sony software kept the filename of most of the files; and gave a new sequence to the files that were previously deleted or formatted long time ago. As you said, the most important part is getting the data back

Phew - glad you got all of the data back Pako. A scary story. Good diagnostic for the future - thank you for sharing. I never imagined this would happen with an SD card.

Thanks for the info Pako and am glad you sorted things out.

Pako,
He had 2 x 8GB PNY cards and both suffered the same problem.
I put his spare in my RX100, it flagged up a format was required which I did but it took about 2 minutes.
I took 1 frame then it locked up the camera.
Formatted again, this time around 1 minute and tried again.
Took 11 frames before locking up again.

After recovering the images I tried the second card with similar results. Once it locked up the camera I tried in a laptop and the card was unreadable other than by the Sandisk software.
Bin fodder.

He bought a Sandisk 8GB card and no problems have occurred, yet! (Fuji bridge camera of some sort).

Mike

Just a couple of years ago I would absolutely keep clear off Sandisk and the likely overpriced stuff; two reasons - too many fakes and also too deep burn-in factory testing of the originals, and hence too frequent malfunctions.
It's much better now as the Sandisk pricing came down to more reasonable levels.

Then considering the manufacturers like PNY, the considerations are now quite grim - their name is sufficiently well known, yet their ability to kill imitations is zilch.
So the low end of 'brand-name' stuff is just as bad or currently worse than the high-end 'Sandisk'-grade branded cards.

I think the mid-range manu's are the safest - too cheap to forge yet large enough to stomp out some sporadic imitators. And I never had problems with neither Kingston nor Transcend who both fit the description perfectly.

mikeriach wrote:Pako,
He had 2 x 8GB PNY cards and both suffered the same problem.
I put his spare in my RX100, it flagged up a format was required which I did but it took about 2 minutes.
I took 1 frame then it locked up the camera.
Formatted again, this time around 1 minute and tried again.
Took 11 frames before locking up again.
Mike

Hi Mike,

You definitely got a (couple of) bad one...
:-/

agorabasta wrote:
..... And I never had problems with neither Kingston nor Transcend who both fit the description perfectly.

I have around 6 Transcend 16GB cards and not a single failure in 2 years. Gets my vote.

Mike

I prefer Sony Memory Stick cards, but they are too expensive and harder to find these days...
Kingston are good and prices really convenient, but their best (fastest) cards are in the same price range as the Sony, that I find quite good (even if I had this accident with this particular card).

As Agorabasta said, counterfeit is also a big issue, avoid eBay for memory cards...

pakodominguez wrote:I prefer Sony Memory Stick cards, but they are too expensive and harder to find these days...

I have to agree here, they are too expensive wrt the SD format cards.

And I also prefer the Sony HX MS, and not only because of speed. The fact is that only the Nex7 of all the Nex line can take any speed advantage from those cards, all other bodies just don't have an interface fast enough. Same goes towards the SLR/SLT bodies - you need a 7-series and up to use the HX full speed.
But there's another advantage of HX - much lower power consumption because of the 8-bit interface; the lower end Nex bodies just take more shots per charge, and they hardly ever overheat shooting video.

I have also used the PC Inspector software to get back all images on an accidently FORMATTED Compact Flash card (what was I thinking). They also have a product to get back files deleted on a computer. Highly recommended.

Having just purchased a genuine 16GB Sandisk Extreme Pro card it has completely revitalised my old 5D