can you forsee a corrupt memory card?

[Hazel Grant]

Hi, not sure if this is the place to ask this, but here's the situation:

we hired a professional to take photos of my dad's 90th birthday party and ended up with zero photos because he found he had a corrupted memory card in his camera. He said that's the first time he'd ever had that happen.

As a still novice, and not wanting to face this problem myself, I'm wondering... is there a way to forsee that a card has become corrupted? How long should one use a card?

[Rocky Sharwell]

Hazel--
In my experience I have had one or two off brand cards that went bad--I would not see anything ahead of time-and I got an error message. I reformatted the card--shot a bit more. Same error message. I used rescue software to recover the images.

I have had 1 Lexar card and 1 Sandisk card not work right out of the box. Sandisk promptly honored the warranty and sent me a new card. Lexar jerked me around a bit but I ultimatley got a new card which I sold to someone with a Nikon.

All may not be lost with the images of the party--Do you know if the photographer attempted to use any recovery or rescue software?

Rocky

[Jackie Schuknecht]

Hazel I have had one corrupt card (out of about 23) which I never use any more. To get the images back I used a program called Photo Rescue. It worked pretty well, and I got most of the images back.

[Lance Peters]

Hi, not sure if this is the place to ask this, but here's the situation:

we hired a professional to take photos of my dad's 90th birthday party and ended up with zero photos because he found he had a corrupted memory card in his camera. He said that's the first time he'd ever had that happen.

As a still novice, and not wanting to face this problem myself, I'm wondering... is there a way to forsee that a card has become corrupted? How long should one use a card?

Hi - If he is a professional?? he should be attempting by any means necessary to recover your images for you.
Have had this happen ONCE!!! - tried everything I knew to access the images with no luck - had no choice but to send the card to a professional data recovery service - who were able to recover every image - did take a while 3 weeks and cost $700 but it had to be done - client had to have the images and we had to keep our reputation of going above and beyond to keep our clients happy.

[David Thomasson]

I'm wondering... is there a way to forsee that a card has become corrupted? How long should one use a card?

Windows has a disk check utility that you can run on a memory card the same way you run it on a hard drive. With the
card plugged into the reader, right-click on that drive and go to Properties > Tools > Check now. If the card is faulty,
it should show up in that check.

[Hazel Grant]

No, I don't know, but assumed he did not. He did a great job on my daughter in law's wedding the next day but jerked me around, not answering my emails, calls for 2 months before finally saying there was nothing there.

[Hazel Grant]

Thanks for your help in letting me know there is hope if such happens to me, and thanks Dave for the checking procedure!

[Roger Clark]

Sometimes a card will start acting flaky and when it does, stop using it. But any piece of equipment can fail without warning at any time. I have had over 40 cards in the last decade (mix of kingston, sandisk, lexar). I have had 3 cards fail (one kingston, and 2 sandisk). All three started acting flaky and I recovered all images. For example, I remember one card gave an error after taking a picture and I immediately stopped using it, and pulled it out of the camera. I got all the images off, reformatted it and tried some test shots. It failed again and I stopped using the card. A third sandisk card (new) was slow and I contacted sandisk support. They had me run a lot of diagnostics and then agreed the card would be replaced. They said I would shortly receive an email giving me the return info and codes. That was over a year ago and I'm still waiting.

Regarding the photographer who lost all images, that is very unfortunate. I suppose it can happen, but usually a card will give an error so one should get a clue. If he was not honest and was evasive on what happened, then I would never use him again. He should have tried recovery and if he couldn't get the images, tried a service. And refunded your money if he couldn't deliver the images.

Roger