Memory card management & recovery

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Ken Porter
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Memory card management & recovery

Hi all, I read an informative interview on file recovery (i.e., memory card management) on a blog run by Thom Hogan, longtime Nikon blogger (dslrbodies.com). He was at NAB (a video tradeshow) and talked with the CEO of a file recovery business based in Florida. There are several good nuggets of info for us photographers about the care & use of the memory cards that we use to record our images on. It would be worth a few minutes to have a read.
http://www.dslrbodies.com/newsviews/the-data-recovery-interview.html

Gerry Bishop
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Very interesting, Ken. Biggest surprise is the info about solid state drives (SSDs). They're touted as insurance against disk failure, but here we learn that if they do go bad it's hard or impossible to recover the data. I think I'll keep my old fashioned disk drives and just make sure they're all backed up--twice!

Steve Muskie
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Gerry, why not use an SSD to boot, improve application launch times, and for Photoshop cache, but have a standard drive running as a constant backup? Or as part of a RAID system? If the SSD fails you'll have a backup but you'll also benefit from improved performance.

Gerry Bishop
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Yes, that is a highly recommended system. Thanks for reminding me of it. Isn't that the system Rick Stillings suggested?

Anton Largiader
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That's what I do. The HD in my Mac went bad last winter and I upgraded it to SSD, but I have a RAID1 external drive with Time Machine.

Ken Porter
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I found the info about not deleting in-camera a helpful reminder, bit of a doh moment!

Michele Fletcher
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Anton,
How do you set up a RAID and what does such cost? thanks.
Michele

Anton Largiader
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Very little to set up. I bought a Western Digital MyBook Duo which has two 2TB WD Red drives in it (WD makes several levels of drive and Red is on the better end). There's a utility that you install on the PC that lets you configure and manage the external drive, and using that I set it as RAID 1. I could also have set it as RAID 0 or to individual.

RAID 0 is striping data to both drives for faster read/write access, but no redundancy. Individual is like making one a D: drive and one an E: drive.

It was a few hundred dollars I think, maybe two years ago. For the same money you could probably get a 2x4TB unit now.

Sandy Hodge
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I would like to return to the issue of the card formatting in the camera and erasing from the card. I didn't know it was not a good idea to erase from the card!! Glad to learn this. Also, what should you do about re-using the card if it isn't good to reformat in the camera? Finally, how do you know what kind of card to use? I bought SanDiskMB/s Extreme for my Panasonic Lumix 1000. But I never know if that is the right one..
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I wonder how many people really know about this stuff?
Sandy

Steve Muskie
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Sandy, in more than 16 years I've never had a problem with formatting in camera nor have I had a situation where I've HAD to recover files from a card. Well, that's not entirely true because I have had two or three cards fail and I just threw them away. I tend to transfer files often from cards to my Mac. Then I format the cards in camera. I don't let the number of files on a card build up over time, although I have filled cards completely in one photo session. That makes me a bit nervous, but so far so good. I might try the Photo Recovery software just to write the cards to all zeros after transferring my photos, unless it takes an unreasonable amount of time. Have you ever lost files on a bad card?

Ken Porter
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I think this article is more about a best practices workflow than about data recovery. In the rare case where data recovery is necessary, then these practices would speed up recovery & improve the recovery success rate. I have read/heard from many photography blogs/pros/etc to only format your memory cards in the camera you will be using them in -- not in the computer. The camera will set up the card for proper file storage & reading. But remember, only format those cards after backing up your photos in two places.

As for brands, I've always used SanDisk & Lexar -- haven't had any issues with those. I've always bought the best card available at the time of my camera purchase, although not the largest/newest size available -- they're too expensive & I'll let others discover any issues with the bleeding edge of technology. I know the Nikon website lists memory cards that have been tested with each camera so check your camera brand site for similar info. It isn't always updated with the latest cards though.

Gene Runion
Gene Runion's picture

I would say that all camera manuals state that memory cards should be formatted in the camera and that formatting is recommended instead of constant deleting images.

It is predicted that SSD will replace all mechanical drives of the size that we use today. Advantages of SSD- weight, physical size, speed, electric cost that consist of consumption and AC required to cool, and reliability.