SD cards: how many? Fill them? Regularly reformat?.......

[Richard G]

I have one SD card for my X100. I have only ever had one card for a digital camera. I did reformat an old one from another camera to do the firmware upgrade. With each download of pictures I was deleting the images from the card, but started to worry that I was writing to the same part of the card repeatedly, so now I have been keeping them all. So a spare card looks sensible. But many here seem to have multiple cards. Tell me how I should be managing the cards including when to reformat. Thanks.

 

[venchka]

My Digital Guru friends say: Transfer. Back up the transfer. Format the card. Go shoot more.
I would add that regular swapping of the card will prevent an "Oh S&@ite, I lost all my pictures on this card." Regular as in daily, morning-afternoon, etc. Especially if you go on a very important trip.

 

[LKeithR]

Memory cards are so cheap now it certainly doesn't hurt to have a few. If I'm shooting a lot I "may" fill one card and start on a second one the same day but that happens very rarely. I usually download images from card to computer at the end of a day but if I'm traveling or lazy I may get get several days worth of shooting on a card before doing the transfer. It really doesn't matter. It's a good idea to always format the card (in-camera) when you first install it. This ensures that card and camera are talking to each other and that you don't throw your number sequence out by using an older card--if you use a card in the camera with an out of sequence number most cameras will pick up the last number on the card and start numbering new images from there; thus requiring you to re-number images and re-set the number sequence in the camera.

I don't know what you're using now but buy the best cards you can afford and don't go too large. Even with my Pentax K20D I only use 4Gig cards. This gives me about 180 RAW + jpeg shots; more if I'm shooting jpeg only and lots as far as I'm concerned. Sure the 8 Gig, 16 Gig and even 32 Gig cards are more convenient but when one fails--and it will, mark my words--you can lose a lot of shots if you have a full card that hasn't been transferred to your computer...

 

[willie_901]

Always and only reformat in the camera once a set of images has been transferred to you computer and backed up.

A high quality card can be used over and over and over again without worry as long as you always format the card when it's in the camera.

 

[Frank Petronio]

Formatting is better for the card than not, I never understood the superstition not to?

I've been shooting digital, 50K per year, never had a good name bought-new card fail me. The only card failures I've had have come from suspect cards that people gave me with a used camera or something like that. Some people abuse them.

There are a lot of fake name-brand cards, I would be careful to buy from really solid sellers, not the lowest price online.

Also, if you carry a bunch of cards outside the camera, those are one more thing to loose, get stolen, or damaged. I don't know the odds, but you could argue it is safer to keep a large card in the camera rather than bounce around with a bunch of little ones.

Also Also, get a newer camera with twin card slots, like the Nikon D7000.

 

[Richard G]

Thanks guys. I'm coming up to speed with this.

 

[majid]

I'll carry spare cards, but that's just in case the primary card fills up. The X100 needs fairly fast cards, so I got a UHS-I for mine, vs. the Sandisk UltraII + USB I normally use with my M9 and X1 (the have a folding design that exposes a USB connector, that way you don't need to worry about SD card readers).

Formatting is the way to go. Deleting files leaves entries in the FAT, doing a quick format in-camera starts you from a clean slate and reduces the risks of data corruption.

 

[Rayt]

SD cards are cheap even the brand name ones as long as you don't go for the really fast ones which don't make much difference if your camera has a good buffer. I have a friend and he does not reuse SD cards. He pops a new one into the camera, fills it, file it and then buys a new one. He has never lost an image.

 

[Frank Petronio]

haha rich Chinese are ridiculous

 

[Rayt]

haha rich Chinese are ridiculous

Hey Frank, if you were referring to my post, my friend is neither, but ridiculous? Maybe.

 

[majid]

I have a friend and he does not reuse SD cards. He pops a new one into the camera, fills it, file it and then buys a new one. He has never lost an image.

Flash memory is not an archival format. The data on one will start to decay after about 5 years or so.

 

[Jamie123]

Hey Frank, if you were referring to my post, my friend is neither, but ridiculous? Maybe.

I would say it is pretty ridiculous. But then again, my mother recently called and asked me "where can I get a new card for my camera? this one's full." :9

She isn't Chinese either, btw.. Don't know what that's got to do with it anyways.

 

[Damaso]

My Digital Guru friends say: Transfer. Back up the transfer. Format the card. Go shoot more.

I agree totally.

 

[Griffin]

Flash memory is not an archival format. The data on one will start to decay after about 5 years or so.

Oh shoot. There goes my strategy for triple backups. :bang: