Had my first card go kaput!

my 1GB "digital extreme" CF card was not readable by my camera tonight. I was able to get all the pictures off it though!


Makes me want to throw away my non sandisk cards.

Interesting way of thinking, your Sandisk fails - and yet you think that's a reason to throw away your non Sandisk cards. I doubt that non-sandisk cards would be any less recoverable (although admitedly having free software supplied saves some time on google).

No losses on my part so far.. touch wood.

i have 1 sandisk and 6 transcend and never had issues with any of them - thank goodness

do you format your card every time you use it?

somethingsimple wrote in post #6263249
do you format your card every time you use it?

Should you?

yabbie wrote in post #6263383
Should you?

I'm also curious about this, because I do.

I have been dealing with Digital Cameras since they first came out and I have had a few cards fail on me over the years. I am happy to say that I haven't had any of my CF Cards fail on me and I have taken countless pictures using both brand name cards and bulk cards bought at places like Micro Center.

With that said the thinking behind formatting your cards each time you use them (which is something I got in the habit of doing) is that it will lay down a fresh file system each time. This is to help prevent corruption and not specifically a failure. But at the same time it could help detect a failing card if the area you are writing to (which isn't much) has an issue.

I'd rather have a card fail on me when I try and format it then after taking 200+ pictures. Of course if the card decides to fail on the 199th photo there isn't a whole lot you can do about it. This is one reason why some photographers that I know won't shoot anything more than a 1GB card EVER!!! This way if the card fails they won't loose the entire job only the pictures on that one card.

2.8orfaster,
I have used CF cards for at least 6 years now and never had any of them fail. However I have had them fail in not being big enough
They are all SanDisk

I've had memory cards from Sandisk, Viking, eBay fake (I think) Sandisk, Sony, Integral, other (can't remember brand)

and in all shapes and sizes from 64MB to 8GB in CF, Memory Stick, SD, Mini SD, Micro SD and never yet had a failure.

My oldest card (Sony 64MB Memory Stick) dates from 2000 and still works fine in my ageing camcorder. My dodgy 8GB (fake?) Sandisk takes the biggest hammering, from my 40D, and has been filled to capacity a few times and has certainly stored many thousands of shots in the last 12 months and all is good.

I've had one 2GB card that was DOA, but, when you get a working card, I can't see that there is much to go wrong after that.

I'm not going to answer 'No, I have never lost pictures to a card failing' because that would be tempting fate

A friend had a card corrupt with about a hundred images from a birthday party on a Nikon P&S last year, I managed to get them all off the card without any problems but they were so badly corrupt they were all but useless.

I did re-format the card and it then all seemed ok, but I advised her to get a new CF card, she didn't bother doing this and has since shot hundreds of images with no further issues.

Yes I format my cards every time.

I've had a CF card fail to where a Canon camera could not write new pictures to the CF, but the CF could be fully read by a PC and even could be written on by a PC! Even in-camera Format would not get that CF to be acceptable by a Canon camera.

The only time I've ever lost photos off a CF card was because of a lousy card reader that corrupted files.

had a 2GB San Disk Ultra Fail on me about 2 months ago (about 2 years old)

has anyone ever shot the last file on a full card in RAW format and had the card go bung? or is that an urban myth?

im always paranoid about that and leave about 3 shots on any full card just in case the next one i shoot is really huge and stuffs the whole card