SD Card Problem Digital Camera stop taking pictures??

[Harley0711]

This may or may not have been posted but I wanted to share what I have learned and maybe help someone out in the future

 

Your out taking pictures and your camera just STOPS taking pictures, you look down at the screen and you may or may NOT see: SD error, SD locked or something else?? or nothing at all.

 

This happened to me on my last cruise - fairly new card and never an issue. I tried and tried, still NOTHING> took the SD card out and put into a friends camera - SAME, nothing.

 

I got back on board the ship and 'Googled' for a few hours and found several products/software that can recover lost pictures on damaged cards IF THEY CAN BE SEEN/RECONIZED by a computer. I talked to the staff at the photo area of the ship - they tried my SD card in several computers and NOTHING - they told me it was trashed and nothing could be done

 

NOT SO FAST - while I was on Google - I found a guy in Germany

 

Recover Fab http://recoverfab.com/

 

This web site had about 5 pages of 'Customer comments' that sounded just like my situation.

 

I got home and tried the SD card in my computer and NOTHING>

 

On recover Fab - they have a VERY high rate of success and his prices are posted right up front (not cheap but how bad do you want the pictures?) once Recoverfab gets your SD card, you will get an email that it has arrived. Mine took a week, 4 days later, I got an email - ALL pictures recovered - Do I still want them - IF not NO charge and if NO pictures are found, NO CHARGE. Very honest guy,, in fact, I had 20 Euro's in safe and included them in my package with the SD card - when he said the card arrived, I ask about the cash - yes it was there also. Honest guy.

 

Bottom line here, most times a SD problem can be fixed by software IF the SD card can be seen by a computer but when it can't and the pictures are important,, Recoverfab can get them for you.

 

What have I learned in all this????

 

My next cruise, I will down load all pictures each night onto a Netbook computer - takes a few min and those are off the camera. In the past, I would go the full trip - 14+ days, 100's of pictures and download all when I get home.. Bad Idea...

 

Hope you never need this guy but if you do,,,, DO NOT throw your SD card away just because your camera or computer can not read it...

 

Plus if you just DELETE your pictures,,, he can still get them off for you... they are still there UNTIL you write over them..

[donaldsc]

You learned your lesson and fortunately your pictures were not lost. I would add an additional step that you should add to your daily backup routine. After you back the pictures up to your netbook, then copy (not move but copy) them to two different flash drives. That way you have them in 3 different places.

 

When you go home, you carry the netbook and one flash drive. Your spouse carries the other flash drive.

 

One more thing. When you copy them from the camera card to the netbook, put each day's pictures in a separate directory. Makes it easier to sort them out when you get home.

 

Just remember. Computer users can be sorted into 2 group. One has already had a hard drive or memory failure. One has not yet had a failure but will someday.

 

DON

[Harley0711]

You learned your lesson and fortunately your pictures were not lost. I would add an additional step that you should add to your daily backup routine. After you back the pictures up to your netbook, then copy (not move but copy) them to two different flash drives. That way you have them in 3 different places.

 

When you go home, you carry the netbook and one flash drive. Your spouse carries the other flash drive.

 

One more thing. When you copy them from the camera card to the netbook, put each day's pictures in a separate directory. Makes it easier to sort them out when you get home.

 

Just remember. Computer users can be sorted into 2 group. One has already had a hard drive or memory failure. One has not yet had a failure but will someday.

 

DON

 

I was thinking along the same route - I have bought several 2 gig thumb drives - 2 gig will hold all I need for one trip - As you say, load to Netbook AND thumb drive - after I get home the Thumb drive goes into the safe, as second back up -

Reason I use the 2 gig thumb drive - recoverfab charges per SIZE of storage device,,, if you have a 8 gig with ONE picture on it.. same as if the 8 gig was FULL.... if you get a chance, go over to his web page and watch the youtube video on how he does this... I talked to a friend today and he told me about a place the City of Turlock uses here in the US - I called them they told me, for a 4 gig SD card, they would work to get the pictures,,, if NO pictures recovered , NO charge, IF they found Pictures - $590.... three times what recoverfab would charge..

[peety3]

Reason I use the 2 gig thumb drive - recoverfab charges per SIZE of storage device,,, if you have a 8 gig with ONE picture on it.. same as if the 8 gig was FULL....

Dude...my camera could fill a 2gig card in 8 seconds. Congratulations on managing to fit all of your stuff in 2GB, but some of us actually shoot a lot. We shot 157GB in a day on our last cruise.

[Harley0711]

Dude...my camera could fill a 2gig card in 8 seconds. Congratulations on managing to fit all of your stuff in 2GB, but some of us actually shoot a lot. We shot 157GB in a day on our last cruise.

 

 

OK, what is wrong with my math here? I currently have a 4 gig card in my camera (yes, its a cannon point and shoot SX280) I 786 pictures on the camera and it shows it has room for over 1500 more??? So if you shooting 157 GB in a day??? what do I have wrong or missing here?

[ikirumata]

OK, what is wrong with my math here? I currently have a 4 gig card in my camera (yes, its a cannon point and shoot SX280) I 786 pictures on the camera and it shows it has room for over 1500 more??? So if you shooting 157 GB in a day??? what do I have wrong or missing here?

 

Peety probably shoots with a 22 megapixel camera in RAW mode which translates to about a 27 megabyte file. If my math is right (fairly low chance...), that is about 5800 shots. Given that the camera he might be using (if its only one) shoots around 6fps, ignoring buffer size, swapping out cards, and battery life (around 1000 shots per battery), he should be able to get there in about 16 minutes. :) Not that he shoots all 157GB in 16 minutes, but its not out of the question that he might shoot that much in a day! Filling a 2 gig card in 8 seconds is not too far off provided the buffer doesnt fill up and cause some slowdown.

 

By comparison, your camera is 12 megapixels and shoots in jpeg which produces a way smaller file, maybe in the 2 megabyte range.

Edited March 10, 2015 by ikirumata

[Harley0711]

Peety probably shoots with a 22 megapixel camera in RAW mode which translates to about a 27 megabyte file. If my math is right (fairly low chance...), that is about 5800 shots. Given that the camera he might be using (if its only one) shoots around 6fps, ignoring buffer size, swapping out cards, and battery life (around 1000 shots per battery), he should be able to get there in about 16 minutes. :) Not that he shoots all 157GB in 16 minutes, but its not out of the question that he might shoot that much in a day!

 

WOW,, would love to have you along with us,,, you have to get some good shots with that fps, lol.. Ya, the way your camera shoots, I now understand,, I checked my past pics... around 5 meg per shot. Like I said, just a small cannon and I did set the camera to shoot the best possible, can't remember the exact settings but its Not in the Raw format, that take a lot of room.

 

anyway, thanks for the post, I am always in the learning mode and this SD going way south was a learning experience, I back up with my lap top, net book, thumb drive and external hard drive,, LOL

[ikirumata]

WOW,, would love to have you along with us,,, you have to get some good shots with that fps, lol.. Ya, the way your camera shoots, I now understand,, I checked my past pics... around 5 meg per shot. Like I said, just a small cannon and I did set the camera to shoot the best possible, can't remember the exact settings but its Not in the Raw format, that take a lot of room.

 

anyway, thanks for the post, I am always in the learning mode and this SD going way south was a learning experience, I back up with my lap top, net book, thumb drive and external hard drive,, LOL

 

Ive looked at the list of things Peety brings with him on a cruise and, yeah, Id love to be his buddy too :)

 

Sorry about your SD experience. Maybe if you have internet access (from your laptop), you could upload them to the cloud after the day of shooting. I have unlimited space on my flickr account (I don't think it was expensive).

 

Thanks for the tip about the recovery guy. I hope I never use him, but good to know he exists.

Edited March 10, 2015 by ikirumata

[donaldsc]

OK, what is wrong with my math here? I currently have a 4 gig card in my camera (yes, its a cannon point and shoot SX280) I 786 pictures on the camera and it shows it has room for over 1500 more??? So if you shooting 157 GB in a day??? what do I have wrong or missing here?

 

You must be shooting in low quality mode. A 4 gig card has a capacity of slightly less than 4E9 gig. If your card will be able to hold 2286 or 2.3E6 pictures, that works out to 1.7 meg per picture. Do the math. That is low resolution JPEG file.

 

What is the quality and/or resolution setting that you are shooting at?

 

DON

[peety3]

Peety probably shoots with a 22 megapixel camera in RAW mode which translates to about a 27 megabyte file. If my math is right (fairly low chance...), that is about 5800 shots. Given that the camera he might be using (if its only one) shoots around 6fps, ignoring buffer size, swapping out cards, and battery life (around 1000 shots per battery), he should be able to get there in about 16 minutes. :) Not that he shoots all 157GB in 16 minutes, but its not out of the question that he might shoot that much in a day! Filling a 2 gig card in 8 seconds is not too far off provided the buffer doesnt fill up and cause some slowdown.

 

Close...Canon 1Dx, 18mp, about 22MB per shot in RAW if shooting at ISO 100, and more MB with higher ISO. At 12fps, 22MB/shot becomes a quarter GB per second, and the buffer's good for about four seconds of hammer-down shooting. With 160MB/sec cards (best I could find last summer), they're caught up within 2 seconds if you fully let off the button, or the camera slows down to about 6-7fps even if you keep the hammer down. But every four-second burst does fill up a GB, so 16 of those bursts and I've filled up a 16GB card (which is the largest I carry) with 500-600 shots. That said, the 1Dx in high-quality JPEG mode does still create ~10MB images, so turning off RAW still doesn't get me anywhere down to the scale that the other person was reporting.

 

And full disclosure to be fair: that 157GB day was spread across five cameras. I was carrying two 1Dx and one 1D Mark III, and my wife was carrying a 5D Mark III and a 7D. None of the cameras came home with batteries BELOW a 40% charge though, and none of the cameras had a battery exchange at all that day. (I had one spare 1D battery with me, and my wife had two spare 5D3/7D batteries with her I think.)

[ikirumata]

...about 22MB per shot in RAW if shooting at ISO 100, and more MB with higher ISO.

 

I didn't know that the file size got bigger at higher ISO. Interesting. Makes sense now that I think about it. Higher ISO, more noise/contrast, less compressible (because of fewer repeated sequences)...bigger file size.

 

Thanks! Learned something new today!

[peety3]

I didn't know that the file size got bigger at higher ISO. Interesting. Makes sense now that I think about it. Higher ISO, more noise/contrast, less compressible (because of fewer repeated sequences)...bigger file size.

 

Thanks! Learned something new today!

Actually, it depends on brand. My old Minolta (now Sony) would create .TIFF images when I asked it to create raw files instead of JPEG. These files were 100% NOT compressed, and were consistently EXACTLY the same size.

 

Canon's .CR2 format is actually a compressed format, though the compression is lossless (meaning that the data compression doesn't average the values or otherwise toss away detail; JPEG compression is a lossy compression as it does at least some averaging, so if a big area of blue sky is all "about" the same color, it gets compressed as though it's exactly the same color). Further, .CR2 embeds a small JPEG into the file (which is lossy-compressed), so that pressing the PLAY button on the back of the camera doesn't require the camera to render the entire RAW file for image review. That small JPEG is going to be a variable size (and bigger, with higher ISOs), so that's another reason that Canon .CR2 files grow in size and are inconsistent in size.

 

All that I know about Nikon's .NEF format is that it's uncompressed. I don't know if it embeds a JPEG into the file.