Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Preventing Memory Card Corruption

I woke up Sunday morning excited to do a family shoot for a great family. We went over to the park, got the shots, checked them out in camera, and I headed home to download. The first disk downloaded fine, but when I hooked the second disk up to the computer nothing happened. Now, I have had one or two files on a disk come back as corrupted before, but this was the ENTIRE disk with all of the more formal group shots on it (a.k.a. the reason that they booked the shoot). I didn't panic (okay I panicked a little bit) and I headed straight to google to try to find some software to fix my problem ASAP so that I didn't have to call these nice people back and tell them that we had to shoot again - which would pretty much be my nightmare. What I found was www.cardrecovery.com. It looked legit so I downloaded it and hoped to God that it wasn't going to infect my computer with some terrible virus. Well not only did it not infect my computer, it recovered all of my files from the disk, plus some files from almost a year ago that were still lurking on there as well.

So, if you should find yourself in need of disk recovery software this one worked out pretty well for me. I am also linking to some articles about how to prevent corruption in the first place. I don't know what caused my disk to go bad. I did accidentally shoot all the way to the end of the disk, but it also could have been heat, or static, or who-knows-what. There is a lot of scepticism swirling around the articles that I linked to and what they suggest (as you will see in the comments) but personally I would rather do something that might be silly and be safe then scoff at something that is easy to do and be sorry. I choose not to ask myself "what if doing this stuff has nothing to do with helping prevent corruption" and instead say "But what if it does?" Better safe than sorry as they always say.

Have a good Wednesday!

http://daydreamsgirl.com/articles/cf-memory-card-safety/



http://www.danedwardsphoto.com/2009/08/21/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-memory-cards/



http://www.microsoft.com/prophoto/articles/recovery.aspx



http://photo.net/canon-eos-digital-camera-forum/00Q1We

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