7d- Something has happened my DATA

[Ger Griffin]

I got back from a photography job today. Since yesterday I decided I was going to leave the card in the camera. Connect the camera to the pc to do the transfer.
I have been shooting RAW and have be using my Transcend 32gb 133x card.
Anyway there is about 400 - 500 files divided up into 10 folders on the card up to this this particular job. This was folder number 11 and there must have been 45 - 50 Raw images in folder 11.

Anyway I was reviewing the photos earlier in the camera, all perfect. When I connected the camera to the pc and turned on the camera (in that order) folder number 11 was nowhere to be found.

Like today never happened. Im running a data recovery program at the moment. Very worried. Not sure what happened. Can only assume there was too much data on the card for the camera to handle or something.

[Mauricio DelaOrta]

Hi Ger,

Some CF cards last longer than other ones. The truth is that they all have a lifetime. I don't know if that is your case, but it is usually the case that the Card is the problem and not the camera (with some exceptions of course).

I would be weary of using that same card.

Good luck in recovering your data!.

[Jesse Haycraft]

A CF card will last a lot longer than a few days (pretty much forever really) unless something is wrong with it. Sounds like that CF card may be bad. Don't use it anymore just to be safe. It's probably not a good idea to use 32gb cards since if it fails you've lost 32gb of data. Its probably better to use several smaller cards.

[Mauricio DelaOrta]

Actually, according to Sandisk, the expected lifespan of a CF card is 100,000 cycles. I am not sure if recording video counts as 1 cycle as photographs do, but my guess it that it doesn't.

Anyway, I agree with Jessee regarding not using that one for future jobs.

One final word of advice, when not using the CF cards, put them in the little cases they come with, as Static Electricity definetly will damage them.

Mauricio

[Kin Lau]

Suggestion #1 - don't use the camera as the card reader, buy a $20- USB reader, they're much faster and much more reliable.

The few times I've had file/dir corruption was when I was using the camera as the reader instead of a card reader.

ps. that's out of approx 1.5TB or 200,000 files and about 10 different cameras, 30 different CF cards.

[Michael Murie]

There's several possible explanations. Here's my best guesses;

1) It could be some kind of physical failure with the card. The problem with that (whether it's physical or something caused by static electricity etc) is that it would be more likely to corrupt a single (or multiple) files, or make the whole card unreadable. Causing a single directory to disappear would mean that the area on the card where the file access table is stored is corrupted. That's possible, but likely to show up immediately in other problems (i.e. continuing problems writing and accessing files on the card.

2) Operator error: you accidentally deleted the directory yourself while accessing the card from the computer

3) The file access table was corrupted when a write operation was interrupted. When the camera or the computer writes files to the card, it also updates the file access table which stores pointers to the files. Updating this table is the most dangerous operation because if you turn off the camera/computer, or eject the card before the file access table is updated correctly, then all the pointers to the files can be lost or corrupted.


One suggestion: Whether using a card reader, or connecting the computer directly to your computer, I generally recommend either using the camera to delete the pictures, or reformat the card using the camera after you're done, rather than using the computer to delete files.