Memory Card Help

[tazdev3225]

I had some issues with my external hard drive, it crashed, and thought I lost all my pictures - about 100,000 pics. Thankfully I found a company that was able to restore most of them and I still had my memory cards and another hard drive.

It seems the one set of pictures I may have lost mean a lot to me - a trip to Scotland with my husband. I have the memory card but it won't let me access the pictures. Both the camera and the computer say it needs to be formatted. I am not real tech savvy but I am smart enough to know that doing that will lose the pictures.

Are there any programs that are available to access the pics or am I out of luck? I did find some in a cloud but it's only a fraction of the pictures. Any help or advice would be appreciated. Thanks

 

[MarkBarbieri]

I think it is helpful to understand a little about how computers/cameras store things on memory cards. They all use a file system. Those most common ones are FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS. They all have a section that works like a table of contents. It stores the filenames, information about the file, and where the data is. The data for the file is stored separately. So even if the file system is corrupted, it is often possible to recover the data. You'll have a bunch of files without filenames, but you'll have the files themselves.

There are a lot of different ways to try to recover and fix the file system, but I'm nervous about recommending anything because doing the wrong thing for your situation can actually make things worse. If the memory card has one, you might want to switch on the read only mode so that nothing on the card can be written over. For an SD card, that's usually a little slider on the side.

Some things I would try (but which could be risky, particularly if not done well) include:
1) Telling no that you don't want to format it and then seeing if you can see it anyway.

2) Can you make an image of the memory card and apply that image to a new memory card. If you can do that, you'll have something you can try fixing without risking the original card.

3) Look at the card in Windows Disk Manager to see what the partition(s) look like. Can it recognize it? Can I assign it a drive letter and then access it through that drive letter?

4) In a command window and with the drive write protected, run CHKDSK (without the /F option that tries to fix problesm) and see what kind of problems it sees.

5) Look for some memory card recovery software. There are a lot of packages out there, but I don't know enough about any of them to recommend one.

Good luck. Keep in mind the memory cards aren't designed to be used for archival purposes. I don't know how long you can expect them to retain their memory. Something from 2019 should definitely be OK, but some people expect them to be good for a decade or more and that's not what they are designed for.

 

[tazdev3225]

Thank you for the response. I did back up everything to a hard drive unfortunately that crashed. I sent it out to a company that specializes in data recovery and unfortunately the one file they couldn't retrieve was that trip. My husband is going blind so he will probably never travel with me like that again and it meant a lot to me.

I found some pics in a cloud I didn't know I had and some on Facebook that I posted so I didn't lose everything even if I can't get the pics off of the card. I will just back up on multiple external hard drives and find a cloud system that will work for me. As far as cards holding their data I have gotten so many different stories if you will. Some IT people in my family say the cards are the safest way to store pics, other members say hard drives and computer hard drives. It is confusing.

I do appreciate the input and who knows maybe I'll get lucky.