So what you’re saying is we should develop a way to print them into a physical medium in order to preserve the digital format in case of disaster…. 🤔 If only someone had thought about this problem a hundred years+ ago.
Did they pay a pro? Why would a pro be using a micro sd? Why would a pro hand you a micro sd not a USB or just a direct link to a google drive or similar?
Anyone that is charging for photos is running them through lightroom or similar first. Why wouldn't they just get another copy? Something doesn't add up.
Can't have paid a professional. I do occasionally freelance work as a photographer (not normally weddings because I fucking hate shooting weddings) and I keep a cloud backup of all the raw images which are provided to the client via link. I also provide a hard copy on a thumb drive of the select images. I keep the cloud copies for a year before deleting them, but I keep disk copies and I have an external hard drive backup.
I don't know a single pro that doesn't do something similar.
Looking at their profile it appears they are a 17 year old amateur. Explains the non pro equipment, no backup and $200. Probably a small paid job for a music gig or something.
I met a professional photographer years ago who kept his body of work on a collection of external old school hard disk drives. When he was working he would have his laptop on his lap, and 2-3 drives strewn around him. One day he tripped over some cables and broke two of them. I felt a little bad for him, but also not at all.
Unless you have a scanning electron microscope and a few hundred hours of compute time at your local supercomputer there's no way you're recovering data from that, microSD cards are almost always moulded directly onto the chip with no PCB
As a professional wedding photographers, my wife and I both have multiple cameras & lenses, and each camera has at least two storage cards, and each camera can connect live to a Bluetooth or network connection.
wifi networks are somewhat slow at some venues. Being very familiar with this market, we know which ones do (or don't,) and we plan accordingly - up to and including the use of our own private wifi with us if needed. Set, forgot, and get to work
You'll be fine. Plug it into the appropriate port and copy the files over. If it doesn't work, contact a data specialist. All the data is on a tiny clip inside, a fraction of the size of the card.
EDIT: As u/Boston_Matt_080 suggested, it's probably best not to plug it into your computer and take it to a data recovery specialist instead in case it breaks further.
I have a micro SD that has a terabyte of storage on it. Just because it's cool.
I understand the concepts behind the tech well enough, but it's still impossible for me to fathom how we can make something on such a tiny scale. It's mind boggling how much tech has changed since I was a kid.
Oh I am aware it will not be optimal, but for just storing and watching some basic movies and tv shows it should be fine. I am not getting 4k rips or anything
They should actually be fast enough for 4k bluray rips, it's more that it sucks to write hundreds of GBs to the card initially. Some of the newer ones go up to 300MB/s though, which would be pretty snappy even with a ton of data.
Best part about it mostly just being storage for them is it can take as long as it needs, but I am spoiled with my samsung evo 990 plus M.2 drives in my pc, a 1tb and 2tb
Which in turn- and not to deter you Russian narwhal- but it makes me not trust such a small storage device for really important stuff. So I wouldn’t really have an arsenal of microsd cards for my important stuff just yet. But if you do, always remember the suggested 3 locations for such items, on site, off site and online (or whatever other suggestions).
I was qas thinking about this recently. Back in highschool a 1GB hard drive was hot shit and a friend speculated that there would be small crystals the size of sugar cube that would be 1GB in 20ish years. Lol!
1GB thumb drives were like the coolest thing since sliced bread when I was in highschool. That much portable storage!? Are you kidding!? sigh I feel old now.
Sounds like you are not as old as me, I was stuck with 1.44MB 3.5" floppy discs in highschool . The first hard drive I used was 80MB ! It was in a 2 bay drive box connected to our Apple IIe with a whopping 64 KB of RAM
I remember my dad paying to upgrade the family computer when I was a kid and when we got it back it had a new 12 megabyte hard drive. Genuinely thought we’d never fill it.
I have an unused 15MB (IIRC) HDD somewhere in the shed. It's a chonky boy, no idea why its still in a foil bag. I believe it was from my dads work a very long time ago.
I still have an entire box of surprise floppy disks, two cartons of unknown VHS tapes, a Blockbuster card and a car phone in its original bag. My children are gonna be stunned by their legacy.
There are some people who scrape the plastic off and basically rig connections to the actual piece that has your data. If you look on YouTube you can see they'll take off the plastic completely and might be able to retrieve your data
Not fixed, but the data may be recoverable. No way to know without talking to an expert though. If the photos are sentimental enough, it might be worth it.
Its to do with the way the data is stored. It isn't designed to be a permanent storage. What was once clear ones and zeros starts to drift and become unreadable.
Now I am super pissed at myself. When my kid was a toddler, she got hold of my phone and dropped it, the SDC card popped out and cracked. I assumed all was lost and tossed it. Dammit.
Not sure I would attempt plugging it in. That might cause more damage. I'd take it directly to a reputable place that can attemp to recover the data just to be safe.
I can't recommend a good data recovery specialist, but I can recommend not using these guys: Secure Data Recovery. I've had good experiences with them in the past, albeit expensive experiences. The last time I reached out for a quote on a "dead" old external HD, I was quoted somewhere around $2500. We rejected the quote, paid $37 to have the external HD returned and it was returned missing the USB cable.
For shits and grins, I plugged it in with a new cable I found and had zero problems using the external HD again. Last experience felt like we were being scammed for obvious reasons.
It really depends on if the chip is damaged. If the chip is damaged, then you get what you get plugging it in. If just one of the connection wires to the chip is damaged, then they could dissolve the plastic and connect up the chip manually. But that is one of those things that would likely cost thousands of dollars.
Given the value of the content, I’d just plug it in and hope for the best.
Or put it into a cheap Micro-SD to full sized SD card and use that. You can basically just treat it as a permanent conversion so you can still insert and remove the card from your SD reader to pull the data off. Basically like a cast. You might even consider glueing it in place but I honestly dont think youd need to go that far.
I'm not sure if I'd risk it, removing the card if it doesn't work would likely cause even more damage.
Edit: just saw the other side is intact, so might be OK. But i would assume a bit of risk lol maybe try an adapter, then if its broken send the whole thing to a specialist
Dude if you are shooting a wedding professionally and using cheap generic cards without a backup, you seriously need to rethink what you are doing. That’s the biggest day in their lives,show them some respect. Every camera you use should have 2 slots with the photos saved to both. And use reliable brands, yes they cost more but far more reliable.
And with a filesystem that supports regular scrubs, parity or even duplicate drives, and SMART checks, you can have data integrity and only replace drives as needed. Still want secondary/offsite backups just in case of catastrophe but much less likelihood of a single drive failure causing data loss with those features.
It is kinda hard to tell if OP is the customer or the photographer in this story. Hopefully they aren't the professional, I feel like they would have learned this lesson the hard way before the have the portfolio to ask for this kind of money.
I use a Nikon Zf as second body on weddings besides my Z8 and this camera has two slots, one for SD and one for micro SD. Though I always shoot in backup mode on both of them.
No worries, no one can know every single camera. I actually find it really strange that Nikon went with a micro SD instead of a second SD slot ¯_(ツ)_/¯
First thing is first. Try to plug that card in, carefully, and transfer everything off it. There's a good chance the casing is cracked but the chip inside is completely fine. What I would do is stick a couple of layers of tape on the broken side to reinforce it and keep it from bending more while you handle it. Hopefully if you are careful that's enough that you can stick it into a device that can read it and the first thing you should do is copy all of those off to a hard drive. And then you should back them up. Because any important photos should absolutely be backed up on two separate devices.
Second, if that doesn't work, you absolutely can pay somebody to retrieve those and odds are decent that they will succeed. Most likely if the drive doesn't function, the circuit board inside is damaged but the actual flash memory chip itself isn't.
These guys are elite! I’ve used them and I recommend them highly. They are honest, they communicate very well and they did an awesome job. https://rossmanngroup.com
The advatage to the adaptor lay on the fact that you needn't remove the micro sd from the adaptor. So if the card is broken but functional, you're covered.
Not joking...you could probably tape that and it would still work; it isn't cracked all of the way through. You only need it to work once to get everything off of there. Otherwise, the photographer should have a backup of everything and can put it on another super-cheap, no-brand SD card for you.
There are data retrieval companies that could help, but that won't be cheap.
Unfortunately data recovery from a cracked micro sd card is usually impossible because the die usually takes up most of the space in the card and basically has to crack for the card to have a visable crack. This thing is almost certainly unrecoverable, especially for "hundreds of dollars"
You could try contacting a data recovery company, but they're probably going to tell you the same thing.
There are ways of recovering all the infos from that damaged micro sd but not so many companies that will do it. I’ve seen it on a YT channel. They did not mentioned the price for the operation but I assume it won’t be cheaper.
Are these copies of wedding photos? Pros wouldnt normally be using micro SD cards. THey also wouldnt normally be giving out the original pics without first editing them on a computer.
Personally if i didnt want to pay $$$ for an expert to maybe recover them id super glue a very thin bit of plastic over the cracked side and just give it a shot in a reader.
What's really going to suck is when you try to get the data off of it and realize that what you thought was a 32 gig card is actually only a 2 GB card and your data is corrupt. Never use a no name SD card for anything important.
I would put a piece of tape over the Crack and use an external card reader with the full size SD card adapter, it doesnt require as much force to insert and remove into the adapter so it is not likely to damage it more.
Or pay a specialist to do it and then make multiple backups.
Adapter chain. Get a USB to MicroSD adapter. Use that. The USB stick type adapters, the CHEAP ones don't rely on any springs or similar to lock the cards into place. It's a bare smooth slide. One of those should hold it together and prevent further damage enabling you to salvage the data.
There are people who can totally recover this. I don't even know if that service is available to the public because they primarily work in forensics but it might be possible to search and find one with a public facing service.
When you recover your photos save them to an HDD. Note: do not use an SSD or any other type of flash storage. Flash storage SSD's, SD cards, USB drives will lose charge over time if not powered up and corrupt.
An HDD won't have this problem. Also redundancy is your best way to prevent losing irreplaceable data (like wedding photos).
Good luck and back up the photos to multiple locations and at least 1 HDD
E: USB Drives and SSDs are flash storage. External SSDs exist the horror I wasn't specific. Micro SD also flash storage. I lost a lot of old photos because I kept my old Micro SSDs from my phones in a small plastic storage container for years. It sucked, pics I can never get back gone. Anyways, to the champion of internet who claimed I don't know much about computers. Try not to be a douche and read the link
All flash-based memory storage medias degrade rapidly when they are not given power for a while. That's why SSDs and flash memory sticks are great but HDDs are still the king of reliable storage
I think what they're trying to say is that while SSD's do retain data when powered off unlike volatile memory (RAM), they do actually require power over time to avoid data loss.
Of course we're talking about a year or two, not weeks or months. However a year or two is also a shocking short period of time considering HDD's can theoretically last indefinitely without power.
Tl;dr - SSD's are still volatile storage. They're just built to retain data over a year without power vs seconds like RAM.
They aren't articulating it great but they are right. Flash memory is not volatile like Ram, but it is not indefinite. It doesn't need a constant charge but over long periods of time without power, and I do mean long, the charges in the memory cells degrade. How long it takes can depend on the quality of the memory and the type of memory. SLC flash memory is far more resistant to this Decay than mlc memory but almost no consumer device you encounter is going to use SLC memory
This is actually true for a lot of "permanent" writable storage media. Hard drives are actually kind of the exception. I'm probably dating myself here but burnable CDs also faded over a fairly short period of time so a lot of people who got wedding photos or videos delivered to them on cdrs or dvd-rs back in the day would actually run into a problem wear like 5 or 10 years later they'd go to look through their wedding video and find that it's corrupted because the burned in data on the desk literally faded. Even magnetic tapes can do this but that's more about the material quality than it is the method. In theory the oxides on the tape should stay where they are in the proper order for as long as that tape exists, but over time the plastic tape itself will often break down on tapes that weren't specifically made for a long-term backup.
The card was likely for a camera, so the pictures are undoubtedly better than what you would get from an average phone.
Cloud storage is fine as back up, but it should never be your main storage for your photos and data.
What if the host company for the cloud storage goes under? What if you stop paying for access to your own personal photos? What if you lost the ability to go online and you no longer have access to your photos?
You should always have multiple backups for your data in case something happens to any one of them. That's the only way to ensure your stuff is secured and accessible.
All that is true however flash storage naturally corrupts after not that long, couple of years or enough read/write cycles. That far outweighs its harms compared to cloud.
Hundreds of dollars of photos on a no name SD card is batshit insane
Keeping 'important' things on a micro-sd card without any sort of backup is pretty cookie in general.
Kooky?
That sure is a kooky monster
nah let him cook
nah let him bake
Let them eat cake
The cake is a lie
Let him kook
No thanks, i just eight.
Dont think it, dont say it, dont think it, dont say it, dont think it, dont say it
But why is 6 afraid of 7?
Cause 789
One backup is no backups, if you don’t have three different copies in two different mediums you don’t have any.
Offshore backups.
It doesn't matter how much copies you make at home, one housefire is all it takes.
Is this real?
I have 2 kind of backups.
A single one of my files on an external HDD that I refresh every 3-6 months.
A third one of important documents I might need that I keep in the cloud AND in another HDD/USB depending on how important it is.
So what you’re saying is we should develop a way to print them into a physical medium in order to preserve the digital format in case of disaster…. 🤔 If only someone had thought about this problem a hundred years+ ago.
or just have your computer hard drive, an external hard drive, and then a cloud back up
most of them are probably uploaded to FB anyway
Small pieces of plastic never become lost or broken, what else was OP supposed to do?
Nand goes bad if it hadnt cracked it probably would have corrupted.
i cant make sense of why.
Did they pay a pro? Why would a pro be using a micro sd? Why would a pro hand you a micro sd not a USB or just a direct link to a google drive or similar?
Anyone that is charging for photos is running them through lightroom or similar first. Why wouldn't they just get another copy? Something doesn't add up.
Can't have paid a professional. I do occasionally freelance work as a photographer (not normally weddings because I fucking hate shooting weddings) and I keep a cloud backup of all the raw images which are provided to the client via link. I also provide a hard copy on a thumb drive of the select images. I keep the cloud copies for a year before deleting them, but I keep disk copies and I have an external hard drive backup.
I don't know a single pro that doesn't do something similar.
Looking at their profile it appears they are a 17 year old amateur. Explains the non pro equipment, no backup and $200. Probably a small paid job for a music gig or something.
Oh lordy, well mistake made, lesson learned hopefully.
Also they just left it laying on a desk
I met a professional photographer years ago who kept his body of work on a collection of external old school hard disk drives. When he was working he would have his laptop on his lap, and 2-3 drives strewn around him. One day he tripped over some cables and broke two of them. I felt a little bad for him, but also not at all.
ive had the printing flake of legit samsung and sandisk cards, i wouldnt say that it has to be noname
I don't think the brand is the issue here. Who doesn't back important shit up?
(I was going to say "back up important shit" but thought this sounded better.)
yeah no backups is the issue time and time again
"Back up important shit" is right, "back important shit up" ends with a preposition.
Especially on a micro SD.
Absolutely not lost.
Not a DIY job but I'd assume it would be worth it to you to pay for that.
Maybe the OPs siblings would CHIP in
Hey this is not the time to be CRACKING jokes like that
No need to disCARD it.
Now untap, upkeep, draw
Yes, if this is hundreds of dollars of photos, OP probably can justify the expense for recovery.
Nah man, the die Is almost certainly cracked, pretty much impossible to recover with current technology. That thing's done.
Unless you have a scanning electron microscope and a few hundred hours of compute time at your local supercomputer there's no way you're recovering data from that, microSD cards are almost always moulded directly onto the chip with no PCB
[deleted]
As a professional wedding photographers, my wife and I both have multiple cameras & lenses, and each camera has at least two storage cards, and each camera can connect live to a Bluetooth or network connection.
wifi networks are somewhat slow at some venues. Being very familiar with this market, we know which ones do (or don't,) and we plan accordingly - up to and including the use of our own private wifi with us if needed. Set, forgot, and get to work
What cameras do you prefer personally, if I may?
I understood they're the client.
You'll be fine. Plug it into the appropriate port and copy the files over. If it doesn't work, contact a data specialist. All the data is on a tiny clip inside, a fraction of the size of the card.
EDIT: As u/Boston_Matt_080 suggested, it's probably best not to plug it into your computer and take it to a data recovery specialist instead in case it breaks further.
Which is genuinely mind blowing considering how tiny the card already is for the amount of data they store.
I have a micro SD that has a terabyte of storage on it. Just because it's cool.
I understand the concepts behind the tech well enough, but it's still impossible for me to fathom how we can make something on such a tiny scale. It's mind boggling how much tech has changed since I was a kid.
Literally just ordered one for my movies and tv shows lol
You might be disappointed by the read and write speeds
Oh I am aware it will not be optimal, but for just storing and watching some basic movies and tv shows it should be fine. I am not getting 4k rips or anything
They should actually be fast enough for 4k bluray rips, it's more that it sucks to write hundreds of GBs to the card initially. Some of the newer ones go up to 300MB/s though, which would be pretty snappy even with a ton of data.
Best part about it mostly just being storage for them is it can take as long as it needs, but I am spoiled with my samsung evo 990 plus M.2 drives in my pc, a 1tb and 2tb
Look into a NAS if you just want the ability to move the card around your house.
Or if you need to be told that the world is yours.
Which in turn- and not to deter you Russian narwhal- but it makes me not trust such a small storage device for really important stuff. So I wouldn’t really have an arsenal of microsd cards for my important stuff just yet. But if you do, always remember the suggested 3 locations for such items, on site, off site and online (or whatever other suggestions).
I was qas thinking about this recently. Back in highschool a 1GB hard drive was hot shit and a friend speculated that there would be small crystals the size of sugar cube that would be 1GB in 20ish years. Lol!
1GB thumb drives were like the coolest thing since sliced bread when I was in highschool. That much portable storage!? Are you kidding!? sigh I feel old now.
Sounds like you are not as old as me, I was stuck with 1.44MB 3.5" floppy discs in highschool . The first hard drive I used was 80MB ! It was in a 2 bay drive box connected to our Apple IIe with a whopping 64 KB of RAM
I remember my dad paying to upgrade the family computer when I was a kid and when we got it back it had a new 12 megabyte hard drive. Genuinely thought we’d never fill it.
I still have a 128mb micro sd card somewhere in a drawer.
I still have a hard drive with 40 MB. It is inside my Compaq 386 PC.
MFM? RLL? My first was 40MB but was IDE. My Uncles was also 40MB but I think it was MFM... It was full height and in what looked like a brass housing.
I have an unused 15MB (IIRC) HDD somewhere in the shed. It's a chonky boy, no idea why its still in a foil bag. I believe it was from my dads work a very long time ago.
I still have an entire box of surprise floppy disks, two cartons of unknown VHS tapes, a Blockbuster card and a car phone in its original bag. My children are gonna be stunned by their legacy.
I still have a SanDisk 32Mb Transflash
You’ve obviously never seen a single bit - they are tiny. You could easily get hundreds if them dancing on the head of a pin.
Yeah, I'm gonna be honest. Bits are terrible dancers
ofc he hasn't seen the size of a single bit. It's not something people just know unless they're interested in it.
idk, I've been interested for the past 20 years but bits are really... really tiny.
Wait I have an old one that was broken by an ex with tons of baby pictures can it be fixed than
There are some people who scrape the plastic off and basically rig connections to the actual piece that has your data. If you look on YouTube you can see they'll take off the plastic completely and might be able to retrieve your data
Not fixed, but the data may be recoverable. No way to know without talking to an expert though. If the photos are sentimental enough, it might be worth it.
Indeed
Just remember - the longer you leave it - the more data gets corrupted overtime.
Keeping important memories on flash storage like this is a terrible idea long term.
It becomes a lot more reliable if you access all the data on it every 6-12 months.
This happened about 14 years ago so I'm guessing I'm screwed I held on to it with the hope that one day I could get it recovered.
Wow 14 years... I mean there is a chance the data is still recoverable by an expert, just some/a lot of it is likely to be corrupted.
I'd still give it a shot but I would attempt to do this ASAP if what's on the card is important to you.
Why is that the case that the data would corrupt overtime? What changes?
Its to do with the way the data is stored. It isn't designed to be a permanent storage. What was once clear ones and zeros starts to drift and become unreadable.
Very likely, actually.
But the services aren't exactly cheap... like several hundred dollars. A lot of specialized labour and tools involved, after all.
As long as the chip inside isn't cracked, then it should be fine.
Now I am super pissed at myself. When my kid was a toddler, she got hold of my phone and dropped it, the SDC card popped out and cracked. I assumed all was lost and tossed it. Dammit.
Sorry to hear that. Chances are it was salvageable.
Not sure I would attempt plugging it in. That might cause more damage. I'd take it directly to a reputable place that can attemp to recover the data just to be safe.
I think this is very wise. I'll edit my comment to reflect that.
I can't recommend a good data recovery specialist, but I can recommend not using these guys: Secure Data Recovery. I've had good experiences with them in the past, albeit expensive experiences. The last time I reached out for a quote on a "dead" old external HD, I was quoted somewhere around $2500. We rejected the quote, paid $37 to have the external HD returned and it was returned missing the USB cable.
For shits and grins, I plugged it in with a new cable I found and had zero problems using the external HD again. Last experience felt like we were being scammed for obvious reasons.
I once dabbed in data recovery. I won't do it again lol
It really depends on if the chip is damaged. If the chip is damaged, then you get what you get plugging it in. If just one of the connection wires to the chip is damaged, then they could dissolve the plastic and connect up the chip manually. But that is one of those things that would likely cost thousands of dollars.
Given the value of the content, I’d just plug it in and hope for the best.
Maybe stick it in an adapter before sticking it in a PC?
Or put it into a cheap Micro-SD to full sized SD card and use that. You can basically just treat it as a permanent conversion so you can still insert and remove the card from your SD reader to pull the data off. Basically like a cast. You might even consider glueing it in place but I honestly dont think youd need to go that far.
did you try to connect it to a pc? maybe its just the plastic cover of your sd card thats damaged
I'm not sure if I'd risk it, removing the card if it doesn't work would likely cause even more damage.
Edit: just saw the other side is intact, so might be OK. But i would assume a bit of risk lol maybe try an adapter, then if its broken send the whole thing to a specialist
Dude if you are shooting a wedding professionally and using cheap generic cards without a backup, you seriously need to rethink what you are doing. That’s the biggest day in their lives,show them some respect. Every camera you use should have 2 slots with the photos saved to both. And use reliable brands, yes they cost more but far more reliable.
3 2 1 backup
3 copies of data
2 different media (1 hard drive, 1 physical copy)
1 off site
And, unfortunately, buy new drives every few years to prevent corruption.
thats exaggerating
And with a filesystem that supports regular scrubs, parity or even duplicate drives, and SMART checks, you can have data integrity and only replace drives as needed. Still want secondary/offsite backups just in case of catastrophe but much less likelihood of a single drive failure causing data loss with those features.
No, it’s not.
Backblaze for the win
Just get married again.
Contact the photographer. May have them on a hard drive in a closet or something.
It is kinda hard to tell if OP is the customer or the photographer in this story. Hopefully they aren't the professional, I feel like they would have learned this lesson the hard way before the have the portfolio to ask for this kind of money.
I assumed customer but I guess the customer probably wouldn't be most upset about the dollar amount
I don't know of any professional camera that takes micro sd.
This very much looks like the customer. The photographer used a no name random card to give the photos over.
If it was me I would have backed the photos up. And as the photographer I have a copy of all my final photos
I use a Nikon Zf as second body on weddings besides my Z8 and this camera has two slots, one for SD and one for micro SD. Though I always shoot in backup mode on both of them.
Oh shit, I stand corrected then
No worries, no one can know every single camera. I actually find it really strange that Nikon went with a micro SD instead of a second SD slot ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I assume as its a small body it's a size constraint?
Soo … does it still work?
That’s annoying. But you can use your backup, right?
Right?
get ready to pay $$$ to data recovery
For work I have used many many times. https://www.werecoverdata.com/services/sd-card-recovery
They recovered data from a hard drive that caught fire about 10 years ago.
relax, just restore from your backup.
So you have backups, right?
RIGHT?
If not, I'm going to call you names.
1.: No backup means no data. I know it's too late to say, but ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS back up your important data. I cannot say this enough.
Failures like these are almost always recoverable. Take it to a specialist. It'll cost you a pretty penny but I suspect that it will be worth it.
Once they've recovered the data, remember to BACK IT UP! Immediately.
First thing is first. Try to plug that card in, carefully, and transfer everything off it. There's a good chance the casing is cracked but the chip inside is completely fine. What I would do is stick a couple of layers of tape on the broken side to reinforce it and keep it from bending more while you handle it. Hopefully if you are careful that's enough that you can stick it into a device that can read it and the first thing you should do is copy all of those off to a hard drive. And then you should back them up. Because any important photos should absolutely be backed up on two separate devices.
Second, if that doesn't work, you absolutely can pay somebody to retrieve those and odds are decent that they will succeed. Most likely if the drive doesn't function, the circuit board inside is damaged but the actual flash memory chip itself isn't.
Should’ve had a back up buddy
These guys are elite! I’ve used them and I recommend them highly. They are honest, they communicate very well and they did an awesome job. https://rossmanngroup.com
X2 for Rossmann we use them at our company for recoveries.
Always best to keep just one copy.
And keep it on the one format that is lost the easiest because it's so tiny
Good. Now I can download it from pirate bay with no DRM
Thanks for reminding me to back up my back up of my back up.
Call a data recovery company. They should be able to fix this. I’ve seen them get data off some absolutely mangled items.
I mean, the company that took the photos might still have them? Assuming you can’t get them anyway, which most of the thread thinks you can.
I think what sucks is that you didn't backup something that was probably very important to you.
That's what you get for trusting an sd card
You got a good deal on those photos. We were looking at like $3000
Another thing is you can try is one of those cheap sd card adapters so you can plug into that first before plugging it into the PC's USB slot.
Not sure what those are called, USB card readers or something?
Edit: fixed a typo haha
Well I’ve never looked at my wedding photos
1 is none, 2 is 1.
As an ex wedding photographer the idea of the only copy of the photos being on a MicroSD card laying out on a table sent me into fight or flight mode
You definitely backed this up in no less than 5 places so you’re good. Right?
Sorry this happened, I also giggled a bit cause wedding photos are easily in the thousands
I'm sure the second marriage will be better.
Counting photos by the amount of money you payed for them, probably means they don't mean so much.... Memories are priceless...
Man, I got my wedding photos backed up in like 3 different places.
Having said this, professional data recovery services can help recover this SD Card.
Important stuff on a no name SD. Wow. I have my wedding pics backed up in 3 physical drives and 2 cloud servers.
What year is this?
wellthatwascompletelyavoidable
Use an external card reader with a micro sd card adaptor.
https://a.co/d/0Zrv8SZ
The advatage to the adaptor lay on the fact that you needn't remove the micro sd from the adaptor. So if the card is broken but functional, you're covered.
100% salvageable. do not pitch it or move it in a way that could break it more, but it is able to be saved with the right care.
Pro bodies have dual card slots for this exact reason.
It’s not lost, pay for a recovery with a specialist. They just build another SD card for you.
If photos were taken by a pro, ask if a copy can be made.
Not joking...you could probably tape that and it would still work; it isn't cracked all of the way through. You only need it to work once to get everything off of there. Otherwise, the photographer should have a backup of everything and can put it on another super-cheap, no-brand SD card for you.
There are data retrieval companies that could help, but that won't be cheap.
It might work as is. It's mostly just a plastic box with a chip in it.
Shit, i still burn important crap to single layer DVD
Put it in a reader, I'm pretty sure it still works just fine.
That doesn't suck at all, easily recovered
Always have cloud backup
Redundancy and backups are the hallmarks of a professional.
I still have a 16mb thumb drive I paid ~$60-$80 for in 2005.
Why would that be the only place you stored the pics? Time to invest in some cloud storage and back up your pics. Shame, but so easily avoided.
How does one find a data recovery specialist and how much would something like this cost? Something similar happened to me with a usb flash drive.
You have them elsewhere, right? I'd imagine even if the wedding were yesterday they'd exist elsewhere than that card.
Unfortunately data recovery from a cracked micro sd card is usually impossible because the die usually takes up most of the space in the card and basically has to crack for the card to have a visable crack. This thing is almost certainly unrecoverable, especially for "hundreds of dollars"
You could try contacting a data recovery company, but they're probably going to tell you the same thing.
There are ways of recovering all the infos from that damaged micro sd but not so many companies that will do it. I’ve seen it on a YT channel. They did not mentioned the price for the operation but I assume it won’t be cheaper.
Worked as an intern in a repair and data recovery shop.
No1 thing my boss said to cudtomers was "if you want to keep your data, keep it in 2 places"
So why isn't there a copy on a computer somewhere or a cloud server or anything else other than a flimsy piece of plastic if they were so valuable?
A SD card is impossible to crack on accident.
This was done intentionally lol.
But the data is not lost, any good it-center will be able to get most if not all the data.
Are these copies of wedding photos? Pros wouldnt normally be using micro SD cards. THey also wouldnt normally be giving out the original pics without first editing them on a computer.
Personally if i didnt want to pay $$$ for an expert to maybe recover them id super glue a very thin bit of plastic over the cracked side and just give it a shot in a reader.
What is “hundreds of dollars of wedding photos”
What's really going to suck is when you try to get the data off of it and realize that what you thought was a 32 gig card is actually only a 2 GB card and your data is corrupt. Never use a no name SD card for anything important.
I would put a piece of tape over the Crack and use an external card reader with the full size SD card adapter, it doesnt require as much force to insert and remove into the adapter so it is not likely to damage it more.
Or pay a specialist to do it and then make multiple backups.
Adapter chain. Get a USB to MicroSD adapter. Use that. The USB stick type adapters, the CHEAP ones don't rely on any springs or similar to lock the cards into place. It's a bare smooth slide. One of those should hold it together and prevent further damage enabling you to salvage the data.
Never go cheap on this, also our first action when we got home is to save them to our pc’s, also the photographer saved them to 2 cards.
Keeping them on a micro sd without backup is the real crime here. Those things fail suddenly and instantaneously.
It never had photos on there. It can only hold 1's and 0's, silly.
Blaming you siblings instead of keeping a backup of your photos. Grow up.
There are people who can totally recover this. I don't even know if that service is available to the public because they primarily work in forensics but it might be possible to search and find one with a public facing service.
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This isn’t correct. DVDs are susceptible to disc rot. They’re not reliable storage long-term.
When you recover your photos save them to an HDD. Note: do not use an SSD or any other type of flash storage. Flash storage SSD's, SD cards, USB drives will lose charge over time if not powered up and corrupt.
An HDD won't have this problem. Also redundancy is your best way to prevent losing irreplaceable data (like wedding photos).
Good luck and back up the photos to multiple locations and at least 1 HDD
E: USB Drives and SSDs are flash storage. External SSDs exist the horror I wasn't specific. Micro SD also flash storage. I lost a lot of old photos because I kept my old Micro SSDs from my phones in a small plastic storage container for years. It sucked, pics I can never get back gone. Anyways, to the champion of internet who claimed I don't know much about computers. Try not to be a douche and read the link
https://www.integralmemory.com/faq1/how-long-will-data-stay-valid-for-on-a-usb-drive/#:~:text=The%20data%20will%20normally%20stay,which%20can%20dissipate%20over%20time.
What? USB drives lose charge if not powered up? What charge? Is this AI?
All flash-based memory storage medias degrade rapidly when they are not given power for a while. That's why SSDs and flash memory sticks are great but HDDs are still the king of reliable storage
Tell me you know absolutely nothing about computers without telling me.
I think what they're trying to say is that while SSD's do retain data when powered off unlike volatile memory (RAM), they do actually require power over time to avoid data loss.
Of course we're talking about a year or two, not weeks or months. However a year or two is also a shocking short period of time considering HDD's can theoretically last indefinitely without power.
Tl;dr - SSD's are still volatile storage. They're just built to retain data over a year without power vs seconds like RAM.
Thank you for explaining it more clearly than I did. Yes I meant long term storage. Years not days or weeks.
... and here I am building a NAS with only SSDs. fuck.
They aren't articulating it great but they are right. Flash memory is not volatile like Ram, but it is not indefinite. It doesn't need a constant charge but over long periods of time without power, and I do mean long, the charges in the memory cells degrade. How long it takes can depend on the quality of the memory and the type of memory. SLC flash memory is far more resistant to this Decay than mlc memory but almost no consumer device you encounter is going to use SLC memory
This is actually true for a lot of "permanent" writable storage media. Hard drives are actually kind of the exception. I'm probably dating myself here but burnable CDs also faded over a fairly short period of time so a lot of people who got wedding photos or videos delivered to them on cdrs or dvd-rs back in the day would actually run into a problem wear like 5 or 10 years later they'd go to look through their wedding video and find that it's corrupted because the burned in data on the desk literally faded. Even magnetic tapes can do this but that's more about the material quality than it is the method. In theory the oxides on the tape should stay where they are in the proper order for as long as that tape exists, but over time the plastic tape itself will often break down on tapes that weren't specifically made for a long-term backup.
Well, it's a fact that ssd lose datas when left unplugged for a moment, i mean a loooooong moment
https://www.integralmemory.com/faq1/how-long-will-data-stay-valid-for-on-a-usb-drive/#:~:text=The%20data%20will%20normally%20stay,which%20can%20dissipate%20over%20time.
OTOH hdd could fails to start up if not regularly turned on
In a modern day with cloud storage, why would you “hundreds of dollars” on flash storage, which corrupts on its own anyway??
The card was likely for a camera, so the pictures are undoubtedly better than what you would get from an average phone.
Cloud storage is fine as back up, but it should never be your main storage for your photos and data.
What if the host company for the cloud storage goes under? What if you stop paying for access to your own personal photos? What if you lost the ability to go online and you no longer have access to your photos?
You should always have multiple backups for your data in case something happens to any one of them. That's the only way to ensure your stuff is secured and accessible.
All that is true however flash storage naturally corrupts after not that long, couple of years or enough read/write cycles. That far outweighs its harms compared to cloud.
Put it into the SD card adapter and copy the files over. I’m sure it works fine.