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.
A close friend of mine had a 18-month old Lexar 64 GB 1000X Professional CF card completely fail on her recently after a wedding. She had filled it with RAW CR2 images on a 5D Mark III, and when I went to import it to my Mac, the computer asked me to "Initialize" (aka format) the card. She was FREAKING out as it was the only copy of these images. We tried every piece of recovery software I could find, and all of them said the card was essentially empty. She tried platinum data services, they said it was empty. She had basically given up, but I refused to believe it was "empty", so I did some googling and found a German company called http://recoverfab.com, who disassembles the card and reads the data from the actual NAND memory chips, and there was enough evidence to trust them so I sent it off on Saturday. Today, they emailed us and we are 100% recovered! If your card shows nothing on the recovery software, it means the card's controller might have died, but the data is still recoverable through this process. It's not cheap ($1000 for 64GB), but compared to other companies with the same service, it is much cheaper.
I had a complete fail on a 32gb sandisk pro..just wouldnt read. So I sent it to a place called forenzic data retrieving lab who were unable to retrieve any data - they then sent it to a company of experts in Russia who worked for a considerable time trying to retrieve data - unfortunately they have been unable. These photos were irriplaceable. Here is what they said..the components of these cards are made in the back end and beyond in China..they are made real cheap and the experts just cant retrieve data from them..they are seeing it more and more.. you think you are buying a quality product but you are not you are buying a product that is extremely profitable.. I have contacted sandisk and I recieved an automated response - that they dont pay for data retrieval..not even the question I asked - I guess its a real problem when you have to create an automated response to cope with all those emails.