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.
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.
why not kingston or transcend? companys who produce memory chips
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.
Great article Lee - I've had 1 Kingston 16g 133x fail on me but only lost a few images in a 5dm2 in the middle of a sporting event. Keep in mind that all drives will at some point fail. Nothing is rated to last forever. Since that failure, I have been replacing my cards once a year. Yes, its a cost factor but rather safe then sorry.
I've been using an 8 and 16GB Sandisk Extreme for several years and recently I've had trouble reading the 16gb consistently. Either in camera or in a reader sometimes it takes several attempts to get LR to read the images. Sometimes it just doesn't see them and sometimes LR will tell me 174( for instance) images weren't imported.
My D800 is requiring an upgrade to a pair of 64gb so the timing is good. Luckily I've never actually lost an image.
FAIL!!!
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=387089024293&set=a.525927292...
No, I've never had a card fail. But I had a card reader that would delete all the images that were on the card. Soon as any card was plugged into it they would just disappear.
I was using this reader: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/537132-REG/Lexar_RW035_001_Profess...
During a trip to Ireland after about 1500 images it was time to download them on my laptop. Soon as I plugged it in they were gone. I had a meltdown. They were all there and I was able to recover them all. But I threw that card reader and even the USB cable away immediately.I was surprised because I was using a good quality Lexar card reader. Never had a problem with the memory card since either.
In 10 years I have never had a medium to high-end Lexar or San Disk card fail me completely. I have lost maybe 1-1.5 individual images per year to file corruption but never a whole card... easily hundreds of thousands of images for hundreds of clients/assignments. I use the Think Tank Pixel Pocket Rocket (CF card holder), I always format and never delete, and I always double check that I am properly backed up before I clear the card and format it.
The most important thing for professional photogs is to rotate through multiple memory cards to avoid using one for weeks or months on end. I have about 8 cards, ranging from 8-32 GB, and I never use one for two assignments in a row unless its a wedding and I need it. Having a card for 3-4 years doesn't mean it has to be used until its dead. Buy 2-3 extra and you will extend the life of them all. And I too shoot important events like weddings with 2 cards per camera... just in case. Not worth the risk... everything fails eventually!
I answered yes+recovered, but I did lose a few images. However since I recovered the vast majority of them, losing a few wasn't a big deal (they were event photos). This was an old SanDisk Ultra II 2GB CF.
I've had problems with a couple of CF cards, one Lexar (I don't remember which model) on which I lost all files (since thrown away) and another CF Kingston 16GB 133x elite pro which I had loaded with raw and jpeg images from a shoot. While I was downloading images from the Kingston just after shooting, I started getting transfer failures for the raw files. I immediately switched to downloading the smaller jpeg files, and I got almost all of them before the CF totally failed. It was really weird watching it progressively fail.
Too bad I couldn't pick two options. A long time ago (2001-2002) I had a Lexar CF card fail and was unable to recover the files, Lexar replaced it no questions asked. I recently had 2 Duracell 16GB CF cards fail within a few weeks of each other. In both cases, they failed after getting files off and putting the card back in the camera.
I have lost an entire page worth of shots on a recent short film shoot. I was shooting on a Sandisk 16gb 45mb/sec card. The card was brand new and had been formatted twice. Luckily we realized the card would not playback the video clips and further checked into the problem. Next we pulled all the data off the card and reformatted it again to see if it would work, but to no avail. The lesson I learned from the story is, always always use your new cards in advance to a shoot, because they are not all in working condition from the factory...
The pool should have more options like:
No, I've never had a card fail with Sandisk CFNo, I've never had a card fail with Lexar CFetc..To compare in each brand, the percentage of failure and non failure.With this pool I can see the percentage of failure with an Sandisk CF, but can't see what is the percentage of non failure, because it's mixed with other brands and formats.
You're right, I thought about adding that but I didn't want to complicate things even more. Plus many people use both lexar and sandisk and that would make things even more confusing.
I've never had a card completely fail, but I have had a few corrupt images on Sandisk cards. Right now I shoot to two big CF cards in by 1DX and a big CF and SD in my 5D3 so I always have an immediate backup.
I've never had a card fail and I just switched to Delkin Devices cards to give them a try. So far, I've been extremely satisfied with the results.
I found it a little surprising to see a higher occurrence of failures in CF cards vs SD. Maybe because CF cards tend to be in "Pro" bodies and they will likely get more card writes then the SD cards.
Ya, I think we just have more DSLR shooters here. If my mom had a SD card error she would think the camera was broken.
I've had more than a memory card failure, I have a sandisk card right now that will literally kill your camera if you even put it in. It got two of my bodies RIGHT before a wedding before I knew what was wrong. I couldnt get sandisk to reimburse me for the camera repair unless i sent in the card and i was too scared to do that. nikon wont tell me how the cameras malfunctioned either for some reason >_<
I had a Lexar 8GB CF card fail 3 years ago, lost files, and now buy only SanDisk. Cards are by far the most reliable thing I carry in my bag-everything else has failed or been damaged on a shoot somehow. With the 20+ cards I have bought and 1,000,000+ photos I have taken in the last 10 years-that is great performance.
Having somebody criticize you for not using a camera with redundant cards is ludicrous, as there are many more other failures and problems with commercial shoots and theft is more common than card failure. The internet breeds many "Experts" who complain about non-existent problems.
I own a Canon 7D and a 16GB (30MB/s – UDMA 2 if I'm not mistaken) SanDisk CF card and I had it failed 3 trimes... (saving money now to buy a 64GB UDMA6 SanDisk CF card. I'm not a pro either, yet. Just taking courses to start my career)...
I lost about 30%-40% of the images... but I think it's more a camera issue rather than a card issue...
Since the new 2.0 firmware upgrade on my 7D I haven't had any other fail, but I can't say for sure if the problem is fixed...
I have a 7d as well, and had an 8gb sandisk extreme CF UDMA that I got with my camera (from Adorama, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't a bootleg card), and when it was about a year and a half old it failed on me while I was on vacation in Washington DC... I was shooting some long exposures in the metro station and all of a sudden my camera gave me a memory card error. It was the only card I'd brought on the trip, so I figured I was screwed... I was able to recover about 80% of the images that night, and I reformatted the card in camera. It worked fine for another couple of months and it failed again... that time it was for good. I couldn't format it, My 7d wouldn't see it, my 20d wouldn't see it, and my computer would't register it in my card reader, so no images were recovered. Thankfully I wasn't shooting for anyone else either time it failed. I replaced that card with a transcend 16gb UDMA card about a year and a half ago, and it has worked fine ever since... I did start formatting my cards in camera every time I need to clear them out rather than deleting everything from the computer. I also have a second 8gb Sandisk that I got from Adorama a few months after I bought my camera, and it has never let me down. Gutoh, I responded to your post because my card partially failed and was recoverable once, then failed permanently. If it were me, I would NOT use the card that has already failed on you for anything important. There's a good chance will fail again...
Never had one fail on me myself, but I´ve seen many do from customers where I work. Mostly Sandisk, but I'd say it's because those are used more than any other brand. We've been able to recover around 75% I'd say. Happens a lot that the last recovered file is huge in MB's and more or less showing gray lines.
Regulary formatting in camera and not switching it around between camera's, especially without formatting in camera first, seems to lessen the chance of this happening.
Came back from a photoshoot and one of my 4GB Sandisk CF Cards failed with unrecoverable images and now although the card works in my D3/D4, the images won't download to the computer. All the more reason to split your work up onto smaller cards rather than have all your eggs in one basket!
I've not had a CF card fail, but I've suffered incompatibility (two brand new 16GB Duracell CF cards) both suffered write errors when used with a D700. The worked fine in other bodies but still sent them back for Lexar cards.
2G CF Sandisk card that failed. I lost all my pictures but thank god i was only testing my Camera. I had it replaced by Costco at NO COST and I had just purchased the card. It never happened again, I use Sandisk card and Transcend.
Over the years since about 1999, I've had four memory cards fail. Two of them were Lexar SD cards, one was a PNY SD card, and one of them was a Sandisk compact flash card. In one case I was able to use software to get images back, in the others, I was not. Maybe it's my "aura". :-/
I've had CF and SD cards fail over time. Both were Extreme III and it took many work cycles over and over. I have a strict workflow of formatting any cards before use. I've always used the high end Sandisk cards and never been caught on a job. I have seen so many shooters using cheap cards get done over when they've failed.
NIGHTMARE. I recently purchased a 5d3 from B&H. A free 16 gig Sandisk CF card came along with the purchase.
The 1st job with the 5d3 was 5 interviews all over town with an assistant, lights, stands, lav+boom shotgun stereo audio etc.
A task in itself to even book everyone in or around their offices and locations with the client/talent all on the same day.
*IMPORTANT NOTE: Audio for 2 of the interviews went straight from a Sennheiser G3 Lavalier receiver to the camera input. No separate audio was recorded at these 2 locations.
The 5d3 is good enough right?
I reviewed the interviews on the camera that evening. The following day the Sandisk CF card from the 5d3 with all of the interviews would NOT read on any computer or even back in the camera itself.
After trying the recovery software/tech support we ended up sending the card back to LT technologies "Sandisk". (The support there was good.) 5 days of sweating and 2 dvds/$225.
Here are the results.
The files did not work importing with normal workflow conversations. I was able to use Pavtube Video Converter to get usable video files from the DVD recovery files.
The audio was not usable at. (*)
This means we were able salvage some of the interviews.
If this doesn't blow your confidence in CF cards I'd like to throw in that I just LOST 2 MORE Transend 16 gig cards that I have been using for around 2 years with no problems.
Like the Sandisk they both will not read on pc/mac and cannot be formatted.
I have a 32gb Lexar that will allow you to write to it but the images are corrupted when attempting to download. I have used multiple PCs, card readers and directly from the camera to narrow down the problem and the only common thing is the card. I have multiple other cards from Lexar and haven't had a single problem.
I had a Sandisk SD card fail on me after about 4 years of faithful service, but as it had a 5 (or may have been 10) year warranty I got in touch with sandisk who took the serial number and informed me it wasn't a genuine Sandisk card! I bought it from an Amazon Marketplace seller for about £100 less than RRP so i guess that should have got alarm bells ringing. Never the less it lasted 4 years fine and died at a fairly convenient time just after I'd copied pictures to my laptop, so panned out ok in the end.
I was filming a documentary about a kid who committed suicide and I was filming heartfelt speeches from teachers to the students about how they care for their well being and don't want them to do what their friend did. My Sandisk extreme pro 8 GB card failed(which was in use for about a year), but luckily I shot a few minutes on a 2gb card and got a scene from the assembly. I was not able to recover the images. If you'd like to see the film its at YourLifeIsWorthIt.com
Nope, never had a memory card fail for me. I shoot film. Have I ever lost photos on film? Yes, when I've used manual mode on my A-1 for my Moon Project. Sometimes the "Sunny f/16" rule works for photographing the full moon, other times, it fails.
I tend to shoot with 2 or 3 cards. I also always keep them on my body (like my wallet or shirt pocket just to keep them safe once done using them. Its good practice. The way i see it if I Shoot a wedding and take 100% all photos on a single card and lose it or it gets corrupted, I've lost 100% everything where I then can use 2 cards and the chance of having 2 lost stolen or fail I still have 50% of something.
I have had one PNY SD card fail during a video shoot. It was just a cheap one on a b-roll camera, but it sucked nonetheless. I shoot with SanDisk and Transcend cards (which reviews show are ultra reliable as well). I have always felt that I am more likely to lose photos from my computer so I dump to both an internal 1TB as my working drive and a RAID 1 NAS as a backup.
When shooting, I carry a hard CF card case, but I am now shooting a 64GB card in my 5D mark III, so it rarely fills up in one day.
I have 2 transcend 16gb SD cards, and both have failed me. Never lost a single pic cause as soon as i plug them in my computer both get "fixed" so maybe it's a camera firmware bug
MOVIE MODE ONLY: Several years ago with a Canon 7D and older firmware, Sandisk cards were known for failing in movie mode. The files would still be visible on the card through your PC/MAC but were all/few corrupt. Finally, some private software company came around to help recover these files. Canon finally updated the firmware to fix this issue. Many people were blaming Sandisk and other memory card companies, while in the end, it was Canon's issue. Since, I have been filming with both SD and CF on Canon 5D mkii and mk3 with no card issues.
I'm a member of a school club where we shoot around 24000 frames in a year. 10-20 different shooters, none of them carefull enough to eject anything from anywhere and no one ever uses the small cases for the cards.
Never had ANY card fail. Not a lexar, kingston or no name ones.... ever in the 3 years i've been here (75000 on 4 different cameras...)
I had a rebadged SanDisc card fail and couldn't recover the images. In fact, I couldn't even reformat the card after the incident. Man, I was frustrated! Thankfully it was a 'creative' shoot and not a paid assignment.
I had an 8GB Transcend CF card fail on me. Went to recover images from it after I hadn't used it in my camera for a few weeks...computer didn't recognize it at all.
We've Had two failures on the Sandisk extreme III's (a 32 GB and a 16 GB) where the housings got brittle, splintered and lodged in the Camera. Both had to be removed with surgical tools. We shoot hacked gh1's and gh2 hd video and it is common to go through 5-8 cards on a shoot. When shooting high bit rates at sharp focus with a wide angle the "transcend" cards have a higher tendency to error out. This usually only costs the shot and not the card. Under these conditions we stick with the extremes III's even though we know that the housings get crispy over time. We should probably cycle them out of use sooner but being creatively entangled in in your work sometimes requires that you stretch everything thin to getRdone.
Steve Bailey
Blownapartstudios
Had mostly Sandisk Extreme's - no problems (except human error/software/computer crash)
Bought a Lexar Pro 32Gb - for every 50ish pictures I'd loose a batch of 3 or so.
Returned it for a Sandisk Extreme - been fine.
A few years ago, 2008, I had my Transcend SD card fail. This happened when I was capturing some unique images of sunset/dusk at the Lake Washington Arboretum. When the batterie on my Canon G9 ran out of power all of the images were lost. I was told at the store that the issue may have been that I had not been formatting the card after use.
I also recently ran into an issue with my Sandisk Extreme Pro 16 gig card used on my Canon 7D. When shooting video I've noticed a frame or two gets dropped. This card has been a workhorse fo me since Dec 2009. In November of 2011 the card took a trip through the laundry. I was so impressed when the card continued to function perfectly, at least until very recently. I have since picked up two quality 16Gb Lexar Pro cards and a 16Gb Sandisk Extreme.
The original Extreme Pro was about $300 and does carry a lifetime warranty. Right now I am only using it for personal stills projects. Dropping frames or having complete card failure would be a disaster on a professional project.
I've had two fails. One 16Gb Sandisk Extreme Pro died on me after half a day of filming, we had to re-shoot the next day. Luckily it wasn't paid work so I knew it wasnt the end of the world, just hassle. Then last week another 16Gb Sandisk extreem died on me half an hour in to a shoot (paid work this time), luckily it was only after half an hour and not right at the end of the shoot. The two cards are completely frazzled, can't even re-format them so they're going straight to the bin. I'm shooting a wedding this weekend and I'm really nervous, I'll be sure to shoot evenly between my 3 cameras incase one of them does go bad again. Also I'll be uploading from camera to laptop several times during the day to keep backups as I go. I shoot with Canon 7Ds. Using top gear and cards you'd like to think your safe. STRESS!
Larger form factors seem to be more resilient. I would caution anyone against storing valuable data on a MicroSD card. I've had a couple different cards act flaky, and one (Kingston 64GB) go from working perfectly to completely dead, in an instant.
Any important photography, I use CF.
Strange thing happened to my card. The camera counter was nearing 9999 during the shoot. When I got home, the only photos that were on the CFC were the pics starting at 0001 on up when the counter restarted. I lost about 200 photos from 9800-9999. They just disappeared.
Strange thing happened to my card. The camera counter was nearing 9999 during the shoot. When I got home, the only photos that were on the CFC were the pics starting at 0001 on up when the counter restarted. I lost about 200 photos from 9800-9999. They just disappeared. I've been shooting with my Canon 7D since May and didn't have any problems the previous two recounts.
Strange thing happened to my card. The camera counter was nearing 9999 during the shoot. When I got home, the only photos that were on the CFC were the pics starting at 0001 on up when the counter restarted. I lost about 200 photos from 9800-9999. They just disappeared. I've been shooting with my Canon 7D since May and didn't have any problems the previous two recounts. 16GB Delkin CF 1000X
had one last night. I recently shot a wedding and I noticed that the preview thumbnail for the last 50+ CR2 files are not showing up. I used a Lexar Platinum II 32gb 200x Instead of an image thumbnail, it shows as a regular CR2 file. I tried opening them in Lightroom 4.4, Lightroom 5.5, Photoshop CC, and Canon's own Image Browser EX. And all failed.
I used Lexar Image Recovery Software for $30 and got them back.
Sandisk Extreme CF (60 MB/s) 32gb card. Put it into my 5D mike one day and it acted as if there was no card in the camera. Took the card out and put it into my reader on my iMac and same thing...the reader light lights up but the computer never sees the card.