Has Your Memory Card Ever Failed?

Has Your Memory Card Ever Failed?

I’ve always been more afraid of human error than a memory card error and because of this I always shoot weddings with 1 card per camera. Now that I shoot with D800s, the 36mp raw files require a 64gb card per camera. In 8 years I’ve shot hundreds of weddings and I’ve never had any sort of card error and I’ve never lost a file. What about you?

Yesterday I was attacked by one of our Twitter followers for “not caring” about my clients because I shoot with 1 card per camera and “when” I get a card corruption I’ll be in serious trouble. I’ve always been afraid of possibly losing a card if I shot with 10-20 per wedding or running out of memory at a key moment. From my experience, my memory cards have been the most reliable piece of gear that I owned. I’ve had cameras, flashes, lenses, batteries, pocket wizards, cables, and studio strobes go down at weddings but never a memory card. I had 1 friend that told me years ago that a Lexar CF card he had went down during a commercial shoot and he lost a few images but I think that is the only story I’ve ever heard of this happening and I have a ton of buddies who are photographers.

So what about you? Have you had a memory card go down? If so were you able to recover the images you had already taken? Let’s all find out how common this is by filling out this poll.

If you have had a card fail, I would love to hear your story in the comments below. Make sure you mention the exact make and model of the card. I’m curios to know if some cards are more unreliable than others.

Gear

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Brandon Andersen
I’ve never had a memory card fail before. I have had flash drives or hard drives fail that contained backup images, but never once has an memory card failed me.
http://www.rlmorris.com Lee Morris
This is going to be frustrating because people are voting that they have had errors but then not writing about the experience. I want to know exactly what happened and how you attempted to recover the files.
http://twitter.com/jeynelson Demon of Razgriz
Had a SanDisk CF Failing me once, it was during Groom’s preparation and all the files are lost without any means to recover it. One TEAM Class 10 16GB SD also failed (lost 60% of the images). These occurrences are in Canon cameras (7D and 60D) , i never have a fail case when using Nikons (i use a D80, D90, and D700).
tompano1
Had one as recently as yesterday. Fortunatly I was able to recover the images with 5 minutes left to the deadline!
And yes cards do get corrupt, I have about three that are “dead”.
* All the cards I use are Sandisk Extreme of varying speed and size.
tompano1
Usually though it’s not that much of a big deal as long as you don’t write over the information recorded on the medium. Last time I used a program called “ZAR” or something like that.
Note that I’m not very careful with my cards, I never have them in the protective pockets and I never eject them from computers just rip them straight out of the card reader.
http://www.facebook.com/jessedeflorio Jesse DeFlorio
I agree with you Lee. I’ve always been more worried that, if I shot with say a dozen cards, I would physically lose one of the cards in an obscure pocket/part of my case/etc, as opposed to a larger card failing.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=557998850 John Flury
Lee, you wrote “raw files require a 64mb card”. Surely you ment 64 GB.
http://www.rlmorris.com Lee Morris
haha yes thanks I’ll fix it. I could hold 1 image on a 64mb card
http://www.rlmorris.com Lee Morris
This poll has been rolling for less than an hour and you guys have scared me! I’m going to shoot with 2 cards per camera from now on.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_UMRJBOOIMADJYZKE42NT6NBWCU Albin
No. But I did obliterate all the (expendable) images from a casual outing while experimenting with Linux and an unfamiliar post-processing app renaming and uploading from the card – oddly “recovery” software dug up hundreds of long forgotten images erased from the card, but not the the files from that day. My workflow since has been to confirm I always have two good transferred copies of image files on other drives, before doing anything to edit/delete from the card.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Caboartisticphoto-Cabohunters/100000614568876 Caboartisticphoto Cabohunters
I always know when enter to this business
the Cards are the best part of this because is where the photos store, 10 years
ago I buy a cheap SanDisk cards and shoot in RAW in HI Speed mode and the
memory cards no works any more because is a lot of information trying to enter
on the memory, So it’s when I decide to buy an Expensive and Pro memory cards SanDisk
Extreme and Lexar 300X, and never have a trouble with my memories. Right now
have the newest cards and readers!!!
http://www.facebook.com/rodrigoambrosio.flores Rodrigo Ambrosio Flores
Twice my cards have failed me, a Sandisk Extreme III and a Sandisk Ultra, and I wasn’t able to recover the files on any of both cases. The ultra failed me during the last stage of a wedding, thankfully, I was using multiple cards, so I only lost about 1 hour of the dance, bad, but not too bad. The Extreme failed while shooting a dance company, but only about 20% of the images where corrupt.
Multiple cards and formatting rather than deleting, those 2 things have saved me since.
David Parrott
Lee, I suspect you’ll get more people clicking through to this article and participating in the survey who’ve experienced failure than those who haven’t, which will bias the results.
As for Sandisk, both their SD cards and their CF are rated for “greater than 1,000,000 hours MTBF” (mean time between failures) http://www.sandisk.com/Assets/File/pdf/retail/OEMdatasheet-US.pdf
ajmills
I can’t remember it happening to any of my cards, but I am not the heaviest of users and I split my images over 4 cards and if I don’t fill all of them, they are rotated in use.
A bit anal, maybe, but I did have to try and rescue some photos for a friend after she’s gone on a trip to Venice. So many of the images were corrupted — the images got corrupted when writing, so although the files were there to be dragged off, there was missing data and stuff, so they were basically junk.
http://www.rlmorris.com Lee Morris
I agree with you. Also, if more people vote that they have had Sandisk failures it may not be because Sandisk is more unreliable but rather because Sandisk is more popular and abundant in the market. I wish I could create a more scientific poll but I’m not sure that is possible.
leethecam
Cards go into oe of those lovely ThinkTank multi-card holders, which is secured to my belt and then pushed down to the bottom of my pocket. I’d need to loose my trousers before the cards disappeared. Simple system… cards face out when empty, face in when used. Don’t erase any pictures… ever… until everything is backed up securely on a Drobo and I’ve had chance to scan through. Second back-up onto a second drive kept away from the original.
True, human error is a worry – particularly with this human… but a single card going pop and not being able to get the data back… Horrible thought…
When I get my 5D3′s (Pocket Wizard has finally brought out a beta version for it’s MiniFlex system) then I’ll probably have a 128GB SD card permanently in the camera which will just get formatted but left in camera, and continue with my 8GB CF cards that I’ll swop out.
http://www.facebook.com/gertarijs Gert Arijs
double post, sorry.
http://www.facebook.com/gertarijs Gert Arijs
I had one micro-SD fail. I think it was a Sandisk. I used it in my phone, but it was left in a phone I never use, so I didn’t lose anything.
http://twitter.com/quantensittich Jonas
If there isn’t a hardware defect but only filesystem corruption which I
once experienced when I turned of the camera before flushing the cache
to card was done I recommend the programm Photorec
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec. Worked great for me. I could
recover all of my lost files.
Jonas
http://www.robloud.com Rob Loud
I had a card actually corrupt my cameras. Both my cameras stopped functioning after putting the same card in the cameras. I thought it was a camera issue, so I moved the card into the other camera. Next thing I know I’m out of cameras, both acting in the same manner, 2000 miles from home, and 60 miles from the nearest pro camera shop.
http://twitter.com/Jpenaphoto JP
Lee,
I’m glad you wrote a post about memory card failures. I used to use Lexar Pro 400x cards with my D700 until I got home from a wedding and one of the cards was “unreadable”. I was able to recover most of the images using Lexar’s Image Rescue software, but the ones I was unable to recover were either half gray, half black, or had funky colors. I threw the card in the trash only to trip over the same stone during a portrait session shortly thereafter. Another Lexar Pro 400x failed me. This time about 20 out of about 200 RAW files were unreadable by Lightroom. I have given up on Lexar and have since switched to SanDisk and haven’t had a problem yet.
http://twitter.com/DArthurPhoto David Arthur
I bought a few pny cards because they were cheap, but had one fail on me. I didn’t lose anything but it won’t record anything anymore. Last card I bought was a SanDisk
http://twitter.com/Ptodorinski Petar Todorinski
My CF card failed in the middle of a hi profile celebrity sesion for a cover story. The half session was gone. No recovery helped. In result: no gigs from that magazine for more than a year. Lesson learned the hard way. First feature I am looking for in a new camera is 2 card slots.
http://twitter.com/davidraco David Raco
I always format the card inside the camera before start shooting.
Anyone who have ever had a failure, formats the card like this?
le_requin
It’s not just the card you need to be careful about, it is also the camera. My trusty old D70s had a phase quite some time ago where it would occasionally write corrupt Raw files to the CF card. Sometimes the cards could then no longer be read or used by the camera (i.e. I couldn’t continue shooting on the same card, it would just say Err or just plain ignore the card), but not always, sometimes I only noticed that something was wrong when I tried to open the files. The cards were always still readable using a card reader. (The problem has since mysteriously gone away by the way, but if something like that happens, a tool like “Instant JPEG From Raw” can often at least recover the full-res JPEGs from the corrupt Raw files, even if the Raw files themselves are garbage.)
My point is, your camera can corrupt the data on cards, too. So can a card reader. Or a virus (or a human) that erases the card ‘s contents once you connect it to a computer. If something like that happens, it is great to have a backup. Most professional cameras have two card slots, so on really important jobs you always have the option shoot to two cards in parallel (in most Nikon models, the secondary slot is unfortunately SD, not CF like the primary one).
Oh, and always format your card in the camera before use, and don’t delete images on the camera if you can avoid it, don’t remove the cards while the busy light is on. I have never had a problem with a card itself.
http://twitter.com/nourelrefai Nour El Refai
I had a transcend 16GB SD card that failed partially, lost 100 shots, and recovered them all, since this incident I am only using Sandisk extreme pro and they never failed.
On another note, I don’t think D800 is best option for shooting weddings, I use my D800 in shooting Architecture but never thought I’ll use it in events! I would go for D4, D3s, or even the D700 for weddings or events.
gantico
it would have been more scientific if you had specified all the positive cases, like “I never had a loss with a Sandisk SD” or “I never had a loss with a Lexar CF”…
caswinson
I read this with great interest as it was going down on Twitter.
I think the guy was way out of line for a couple reasons, mostly for the “you don’t care stuff” but whatever, people are allowed to freak out I guess. Personally I wouldn’t have engaged him but that’s another story.
First, if your camera has two card slots, be they CF and CF or CF and SD or maybe even two SD, then load them up. I can’t really see a reason not to does it make you a bad person if you don’t? No.
Heck a lot of the guys I know that shoot with two cards, do so in serial fashion not in mirror fashion so two cards are really just giving more capacity not data protection.
Second, Adding more cards to your bag, if you have a one slot camera will give you more overall capacity but won’t really protect against failures of the card itself. You do also run the risk of losing cards and that is a whole other problem in and of itself. Think of how many photogs shoot with cameras that ONLY have ONE card slot, do they not care about their clients? I’m a Canon guy, the 5D and 5D MK II were/are big wedding cameras for us (or so I am told) and unless you were buying pro bodies like the 1D(s) nnn you weren’t afforded dual slots until recently with the 5D MK III. Imagine what the world was like back in the day of FILM cameras…gasp! No data cards at all, just film…god for bid!
Third, I’d be more worried about a photog that showed up for a wedding with only one camera then how many cards they were shooting with in said camera. There are certain shots in a wedding that you can’t re-stage or reproduce but there are lots that you can.
I’ve personally never run into a data corruption problem that was due to my card where another card in the camera would have made a difference. Most of the data related failures were due to the camera and not the card, the camera wouldn’t write properly to the card(s). Heck I bought a brand new Leica M9 that out of the box, and for MONTHS would intermittently not work with SanDisk cards. That camera finally got fixed by Leica about 9 months after its purchase.
I shoot mostly news, commercial and fashion in that order.
Depending on the type of news assignment I am loaded up, with dual cards and backup cameras or I may be shooting lite with a single camera and an iPhone as backup. The one thing I have learned to do is to backup my images or transfer images ASAP. I use a colorspace UDMA device to back up files in the field to a SSD drive. Then when I get back to my laptop I upload from card to my service.
(this might not be a bad thing for a wedding photog to have in his or her bag)
In studio I shoot mostly tethered when I do shoot to cards, I use two but not because I’m worried about data loss, but more about the speed of the workflow and editing process.
I can keep one card in studio and look at it and we can chose which ones we want, the other card is in post and they are doing what they do on the files that we choose.
I guess my rambling point to all this is, if you have two card slots and can afford to use them, great do it. Does it make you a bad person if you don’t, no not at all. I think this race of technology has made us lose site of making the best picture and made us focus more on debatable minutia of detail of the tech and business side of photography and less on crafting images.
Andrew Cates
1. Before any client work, I always format in-camera (Nikon or Canon, do it for both on D700 & 5DM2).
2. NEVER fill your card up all the way.
3. Test every few months and run a media scan using (Mac guy here) Disk Warrior and/or Drive Genius.
Never had one fail – yet!
Diana Bowen
I had an 8GB SanDisk Extreme crash on my once
caswinson
Just an aside, someone mentioned not using a D800 as a wedding camera, and now I can’t find the post. As a canon user I had a question about files sizes and image size as it relates to Nikon.
on the D800 I assume you can chose file size, in Canon we have something like RAW, Medium RAW, Small RAW. If you were really worried about file size and speed of certain shots, could you chose the next size down file size on the D800 and still get fantastic pictures suitable for printing to a pretty decent size? Like if you went to the next size down in FX at 5,520 x 3,680, you still retain the best of the sensor right? It’s not like it degrades or limits the use of the sensor or disables part of the sensor, right? Thanks…
wayneleone
Why buy a high end camera that provides a second memory card slot for the purposes of creating a back up (I know you can also use it for overflow) and not use a second card in the camera?? If you’ve never had a failure after years of shooting, do you not think the odds are stacking up against you?
http://www.rlmorris.com Lee Morris
Ya I resisted because the files were so large. You can’t shoot smaller RAW files but you can lower the bit rate which makes files a bit smaller and the lowers the dynamic range. Lightroom requires and all night preview render to work with the files but we are dealing with it.
http://twitter.com/larzbolor larzbolor
i’ve had an sd card first worked with my d7000 but then after about 200 raw images it began failing to work with my camera (maybe some comapibility issues). luckily i was still able to recover all that images thru the card reader on my pc.
http://www.facebook.com/bunniebray Coby Bray
I’ve had 2 cards crash and I traced both back to user error I once forgot to format in camera after deleting files of on my computer resualting in a corrupted data, and the seconed was from shooting 7fps with low battery power also corrupting data, other then that my 8gb ridata CF has been flawless for over 40,000 shots and my 8gb eye-fi card has had around 50,000 shots pass through it.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=606123089 Amy Tucker
No. And now that I have voted I will surely have one go down at tomorrows wedding. Haha.
Neil Hargreaves
I’ve lost 2 Sandisk Extremes, both 16GB and both times it was user error. I bricked one when I removed it from my card reader when I thought is had finished ejecting. I didn’t lose anything as I’d already copied the files.
Send time was when I dropped my 5D2 shooting a wedding. The batteries came out whilst the file was still being written it seems. I was able to recover the files using the recovery software packaged with the Sandisk cards. The files were the least of my worry – bits of my 35L went rolling across the dance floor!
http://www.digitalqmedia.com Chuck Navarro
I shoot with two D7000′s and use Sandisk SD’s in both slots. One gets a raw and the other gets a large jpeg. That way I have a backup if the raw card fails. I’ve had an 8gb sandisk start to corrupt after thousands of images. Still works but will get a random loss of a pic every now and then so it’s been retired. I bought some 32gb sandisk’s and one would lock up my d7000 after a few pics. Gave and “Err” on the LCD. I remove it and the second SD kicks in. So I need to warranty that one. Otherwise, I’ve never had any problems.
http://profile.yahoo.com/MWBXKYN5QFPZABS3LPH4OYHO6U joel
I had several corrupted files (looked like JP’s posted examples) on a Lexar Pro 16GB card in a D700. Luckily, I had multiple versions of the shot.
https://www.facebook.com/FlexibleVision Roman
Ones I made a format accidentally but I just took the card out and recovered the card easily with free software http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec I used some no-name card for first 3years in 30D with no problem. Now my sister is using this card. I have 4x16GB SanDisk and no problems at all. But I have 4 cards for that unexpected situation ;)
http://www.facebook.com/james.peryer James Peryer
Have three sandisk CF cards that Ive been abusing for about 4 years and have never had an issue.
http://www.facebook.com/adi.radulescu Adrian Rădulescu
I had a brand new CF 16Gb Sandisk Extreme Pro that failed after I first connected it to the computer for download. After that it was seen as a memory card but couldn’t be accessed. Amazon changed the card after sending it back
http://twitter.com/Buster083 Brock
I had a Sandisk Extreme 8GB CF card partially fail on a European holiday and lost 60% of the images. I suspect the cold temperatures (winter in Finland north of the Arctic Circle) may have played a role. I attempted recovery when I returned home but without success however I quarantined the card and a couple of years later managed to recover the images with another, newer recovery program.
http://twitter.com/Jensthetraveler Jens Marklund
Never. Only shoot Sandisk, 16gb CF and below. From what I’ve heard, some people say the larger capacities are more likely to fail, same with HDDs (due to more plates in the disk).
Talked to the best local camera store here, who said he never seen a Sandisk card fail, that wasn’t able to be fully recovered. But he had seen other brands. I think they send it to Sandisk, who then recover the card for you, if I’m not mistaken. Other brands might do this too.
http://www.facebook.com/kidyosh ‘Sa Jamil Hogan
I had a cheap SD card I got from Walmart and I shocked my camera via static shock when I picked it up and the card corrupted and lost half of the images. The other cheap card soon died too. Since then I’ve only bought Brandname cards.
Knox Daniel
I had a card failure during a wedding shoot and that was also due to the fact that I was using Kingston CF on a Nikon. No more Kingston cards for me and now I have always stick to the manufacturer recommendation on card brands. No issues thus far with Sandisk. Also tried Transcend and no issues there too.
http://twitter.com/grafichouse Martin Ellard
I’ve had issues lately which may not be the cards fault, I’m going to contact canon about this but I thought I would post here too. After shooting on the 5D mkIII with a sandisk 32gb UDMA card I have put the card in to a card reader on my macbook and viewed the images in photomechanic, selected (ticked) the images I wanted to edit, copied them to my hard drive where I edit them in lightroom.
When I put the card back in to the mkIII the camera gives me an error screen telling me to turn the camera off and on again, which doesn’t work, the error screen is still there, I have to format the card in my mk2 body before I can format it again in the mkIII . This never happened with the mk2 so i’m guessing it’s a camera issue.
is this familiar to anyone else ? it’s a major problem if you wanted to edit a couple of frames then carry on shooting with the same card without losing the rest of your pictures as the camera won’t let you use the card again !!!!
Jack_AZ
After having multiple SanDisk CF and SD card failures (some with as few as 1,000 images captured – all non-recoverable) on multiple cameras I transitioned to Lexar Professional cards and have not had a failure since (knocks on wood) with a couple hundred thousand captures.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Igor-InvisibleSounds-Butckhrikidze/723953185 Igor InvisibleSounds Butckhrik
why not kingston or transcend? companys who produce memory chips
Hunter Harrison
I have had two different Lexar CF cards “fail”. These were older cards and I think they were just wearing out. The nature of the failure was strange. About every 20th frame was corrupted. They were so badly corrupted that they could not be saved. Strangely, this happened at the same time I upgraded to the D4. At first I thought it was the camera. After some experimentation, it proved to be the card.
This is why I have always used as many cards as reasonably possible at a wedding. I always use 16gb cards and I will typically go through 4-6 at a wedding. I find the 16gb cards to be a good balance between multi-card safety and lack of capacity.

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