Backups! Very important!!!
I guess that it was bound to happen, eventually. I’ve seen it happen to others, but it was my first experience. “Honestly! This has never happened to me before!!!”. 
I was shooting pictures of Tony’s basketball game on Friday evening. Things were going well for both the team and myself. They were beating their opponent, South Mecklenburg High School, by a healthy margin, and I was getting some decent shots. Suddenly, my camera started to respond slowly when I pressed the playback button to ‘chimp’ at a few shots. I thought nothing of it at the time.
I continued to shoot and things continued to go well. The team pulled further ahead and I accumulated more photos. Suddenly, and cannot say ‘without warning’, because in retrospect, I did have warning, I got a message on my camera that said: “This card cannot be used!”. Uh, oh!!! I quickly went into my bag, grabbed another CF card, swapped, and was back in business in about 20 seconds. Shooting continues!
I kept shooting. Tony kept shooting.
The 4 GB card is ‘old’ technology. When I got my camera, some 20 months ago, there was no such thing as a 4 GB CF card. 2 GB was the largest, however, Hitachi made a 4 GB micro-drive, which holds 4 GB of data but is not flash memory. It is actually a micro hard drive. Therefore, it has moving parts and is subject to failure. It gave a good run. I used it almost exclusively for all of my sports shooting. I think that I’ll retire it and put it out to pasture now. “Fool me once, shame on you! Fool me twice, shame on me!”. Looks like I’ll have to get another 4 GB card; this time it won’t have to be a micro-drive!
Earlier in the evening I had considered taking only my camera and one CF card with me. I’m glad that I didn’t. I learned a valuable lesson about being prepared, that’s for sure! In the end, our team won by a healthy margin and I was able to recover all of the pictures off of the other card. I hope that cards don’t fail frequently, but just in case they do, I’ll keep backups and software on my laptop and desktop that can recover files from corrupted cards! I suggest that you do the same!
Any suggestions for CF cards that are both reasonably priced and provide good performance? Is there really a big difference between a 133x and a 300x? Thanks!
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2 Responses to “Backups”
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I haven’t had any problems like that…yet. My husband has though but they are tough on those cards at his work. I use the San Disk Ultra II’s. I just get them at COSTCO when they are on coupon. I have a 4gb and several 1gb back ups. Haven’t had any problems with them. I couldn’t tell you any difference between cards. I have some San Disk cards that are the “low end” too and I couldn’t ever tell the difference when I use them.
I’m not very well-versed on CF cards either. I use all 2gb cards, various brands. I only had one lock up on me once at a wedding. I shot a few frames and noticed nothing was being recorded. I have no idea how or why that happened. I turned my camera off and on, changed cards, and never had the same problem again.
As far as reasonably priced cards? My advice is make friends with the people at the photo store….I can usually get $10 or $15 knocked off with some friendly conversation