Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

SUMMARY: DO NOT BUY THIS CARD UNLESS YOU WANT TO PLAY RUSSIAN ROULETTE WITH YOUR DATA. Card worked fine when I bought it, but malfunctioned within the first 400 photos -- malfunctioned so badly that some very technical tools were needed to recover anything at all, and some photos were still permanently lost. Recovering the data requires the attention of a serious data recovery expert or someone with substantial technical knowledge and lots of time. DETAILS: I made the mistake buying this card for my camera right before a long trip overseas. It worked fine on the first few dozen shots. I didn't see any improvement in speed over my trusty 1.5-year-old Transcend 8GB Class-6 card, but that was most likely because the camera itself (Canon EOS Rebel 1000D/XSi) could not write images any faster than that (full-size JPEG, continuous shutter mode, roughly did ~2.5-3 images/second on both cards, with no slowdown after the first few shots). 200 shots or so into using this card, I get a sudden mysterious message from the camera when I try to take a new shot -- Card Format Invalid (never saw it in the previous 1.5 years on this camera with 3 other SDHC cards). I look around for a bit, and discover that turning the camera off, pulling the card out and putting it back in is enough to clear the error message, and the previous photos are still visible. I then make the mistake of assuming the problem is just that -- needing to "reboot" the camera when the card is acting stupid, and nothing else. Over the next 200 or so shots, this problem comes up every 50 shots or so. Then, after yet another "reboot", I notice that the camera's playback function is only showing the last 30 photos!!! Yet it shows that there's only 5.7G of space left on the camera -- the other 2G+ _should_ be taken up by the photos I've shot thus far, but the playback doesn't show them. And this happens in the middle of a trek through the Peruvian Andes, several days' walk/horse ride from the first village with electricity, let alone a computer (with lots of once-in-a-lifetime shots on the camera). I pull this card out immediately, plug in my backup card, and wait until coming back to civilization to take a look at the card. Sure enough, the card is severely corrupted -- the directory listing is showing a bunch of folders with weird-character names, and only the last ~30 photos are visible from the computer, too! RECOVERY SUGGESTIONS: Hopefully you'll read this before buying and will not buy this piece of junk card. If you had the misfortune of running into the same problem and losing your data, read on. I have now had time to examine what was left on the card, using tools that are not easily usable to people without substantial technical training. I've managed to recover over 90% of my photos, but this was NOT easy, and I suspect that even some shops specializing in data recovery from failed disks may not know how to get your data back -- this is NOT as simple as just undeleting a file! Non-technical instructions: 1. As soon as you see the FIRST error involving the card format, turn off the camera, pull out the card, and copy all of your photos to a different device (computer/harddrive/whatnot). The earlier you stop using this card, the safer your photos will be. 2. As soon as the first problem happens, move the little plastic slider on the side of the card to the "Lock" position -- this will prevent anything else from being written on the card, which lowers the risk of what's left of your photos being overwritten. 3. If you see directories (aka folders) with weird names when you plug this card into a computer -- or see a huge number of photos missing when you look at them on the camera, take the card out IMMEDIATELY, and take the card to a data recovery shop or a technical expert willing to look at the card in depth. Give them a printout of the explanation below. Technical details: At least in my case, the filesystem was indeed somehow damaged, perhaps by the camera deciding to write over the location of the root directory somehow. I took a full disk image of the card, and operated on the disk image only (there were no read errors when making the image, FWIW). Somehow I was lucky enough to have the original _subdirectories_ \DCIM and \DCIM\100CANON survive on the card intact even though the root directory structure now pointed to a different, new, place on the filesystem as \DCIM. I found the location of the old 100CANON directory on the filesystem by searching for one of the filenames I knew would exist in the old directory, like IMG_7000, across the whole disk image. I then edited the filesystem (yea, with a hex editor!) to have the new \DCIM directory point to the old 100CANON subdirectory. See the Wikipedia article on FAT32 for a reasonably easy reference on how to find the 4 bytes that need to be edited, and how to calculate the correct updated value. Mounting the edited disk image (with Linux's 'mount -t loop'), the directory was intact, and all but about 5% of the photos were completely intact as well -- the remainder must have been overwritten after the directory structure got corrupted. Depending on how long it takes the user to notice a problem, of course, much more damage could easily happen to the original data. Here's one easy hack to see how much you can hope to recover, if you're recovering camera data. The same trick may be useful for locating the JPEGs if the original image-containing directory is no longer intact (good luck with recovery then! I thankfully didn't have to do this). Take any image produced by the same camera, look at its JFIF headers. My camera leaves the string "Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XS" in two places in every JPEG it creates, early on in the JFIF header. Search for that string across the whole filesystem. If there's, say, 500 hits, that means you can hope for [easy] recovery of at most 250 photos -- any photo that is missing the JFIF headers will be missing the first chunk of the file, and will make it very hard both to find _and_ to reconstruct the remaining data, if any, into a usable JPEG (I have not tried to do this, at least, and it seems very hard).