The Card Full Episode

Since using Photo Mechanic to load my photos from the SD cards onto my little HP spectre, I’ve changed over to not immediately deleting the photos from the card. Even though I have set Photo Mechanic to make a second copy as it uploads. Instead I leave the card for a few days till it fills to about 2/3rd. I have five 16GB cards so I can last a couple of weeks before I need to clean the cards, by which time I have plenty of opportunity the photos safely backed up to one of two 1TB portable drives (in the Red cases) that I carry as I travel.

I store my SD cards in the little blue case , and have adopted the process of turning them one way when they are empty and reversing them the another when they are full enough. Well that’s the theory.

Last night I took a lot of photos of the sunset, two cruise ship leaving port, and the CARD FULL message just as some fireworks started. I grabbed card case and swapped the cards but I was a bit late to get the best of the fireworks, This seemed to go well Until I got back to the hotel room. I put the full card in the reader and it was EMPTY! Worse the new card from the camera also reported it was empty. I got out a third card and it worked fine. Hmmm! I feared the worse and downloaded Recuva, (a disk file recovery tool I have used before and trust). A couple of very long deep recovery later only turned up old photos and some corrupted files. Rather than panic I figure I should just leave the cards and pack them away and not reuse them as I was travelling.

Next morning I got out my camera and got a fresh card from my card wallet and as soon as I turned the camera on there was the CARD FULL message again. My first reaction was that the camera must be corrupted the cards. Arrrh!

Then it struck me there was a simple explanation, In the dark last night I got the direction of the cards mixed up. The full card was always safe in the blue case and I was trying to red cards I had already cleaned. So I didn’t loose my great sunset shots, and I will pay more attention which way by cards are facing.