Photography

Photographic a multi-service member dignified body transfer. Camera failed just as the bodies were being removed from the helicopters.

Thankfully I had two backup cameras and a bunch of extra cards. Only lost maybe a few seconds swapping out.

I know of 2 card failures amongst 4 pro photographers. Both appear to be related a low height drop onto a hard surface. I've had a few cards age out, they start getting slow to read/write, corrupted, eventually can't read them. No recovery tools work at that point. I've had x2 hard drives fail. One main and one backup, gave up the magic smoke. All in 10 years of shooting. Used to run Raid 1 on my backups . Lots of boot sector errors.

I've had cards fail in a dual card setup

But you do have to factor in that with a dual card setup you're doubling your chances of seeing a failure in the first place :)

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It's obviously still well worth it imo (basically essential if pro), but the anecdotal stats can make it seem like cards fail all the time, when it's actually still quite rare

I probably wouldn't do a super important event with just a single card. I know some people do but imagine telling your client that. Yeah i COULD have got a pro grade camera with 2 slots, but i didn't want to and now your wedding photos are gone.

I probably wouldn't tackle a wedding without a dual slot primary body and a backup full frame body (rp or something

Ive had 1 card fail so far but it was only for test shots of my bedroom so nothing lost. Buy quality brands!

I have accidentally formatted a card before— it was early, lol— but have not had one fail in a camera yet. When I go on a trip I do a nightly dump from my card to the computer for a backup because I’d hate to lose a day’s images.

I almost completely lost a 2000 frame aurora time lapse on a card that corrupted during shooting.

10 years into photography. Just one card failure however I lost images from an improvised maternity shot. It was done quickly in-location without prior arrangements. Shortly after I was done, my card died.

The more data you generate, the more failures you will have. I've generated about 100 TB in 20 years (photos and video). I have a card failure every year or two with professional grade cards. I insist on two card slots.

I have.

I have had a card failure only once. About 2 years ago so both camera and card were pretty new. Not talking old tech.

After a shoot and before transferring to my computer the card reformatted. Completely wiped.

I knew that the photos were there somewhere. I just had to somehow un-reformat it.

After going in to a few computer repair and camera shops for advice, I was able to run a data recovery which indiscriminately recovered every photo on that card. Including the ones I needed. It took hours but it worked.

After that experience I became a dual card shooter.

Had a card fail because I forgot to format it. It was formatted to my D7000 and not my D750 so the main card was totally useless but the backup saved the jpegs and I was able to edit those. It was just product photos that could have been redone but who wants to do that haha but I’m a firm believer in dual slots for that reason.

2 sd cards died in about 15 years. Used like 20 different ones. One card died completely, second switched to read only state, but wrongly reported by other hw. It seems, like data beeing written, but they are not and only older data are there. Yeah, second slot saves lives.

I've never had a card fail, but I have had hard drives fail.

I haven’t had one but I’ve only been doing photography for a couple years and as soon as I can I always get my photos onto my computer and onto my google drive so I have backups

I have dual card slots so not an issue. But even then if it’s important photos I’ll take both cards out and replace them with 2 different ones half way through. So at least then I’ve got something to fall back on if somehow had 3 failures

Personally for me, I would never gamble on a second SD card slot. You buy a camera with a second card slot, hoping the card never fails but if it does, you still have a back up of all your photos.

Otherwise good luck trying to explain to a wedding client how you messed up all the photos from their special day.

Tip for you all who don't know it already. Most flash and solid state storage will try to keep the number of writes per 'cell' the same. So first use it will start writing across the memory and even if you delete images/files or format, it will keep progressing and writing to consecutive cells until they've all been used once, then back to the beginning for write 2 as you keep using it.

You won't generally find any sold state storage these days which some cells have significant 'wear' and others have not.

So, buy the biggest SD/CF/etc you can as it will generally last longer. It also has the side effect that the larger cards usually have a bit faster read/write speed for the same class rating.

I did once see a device which was effectively an external hard drive with built in battery and CF/SD reader. When you plug in a card, it would copy all the data to the drive, verify it, and optionally delete it from the card. If I was stuck with a single slot body, I'd look for something like this as a backup. If I didn't find anything, I'd get a Raspberry Pi with battery and create my own version, possibly with 4G/5G connection to the cloud backup as well.

I'm just an amateur photographer and tech tinkerer. I've never had the CompactFlash cards have any issues in my camera. I have had multiple microSD card failures, and not from no-name brands either, the 'pro' or 'extreme' versions of sd cards.

My most recent camera has dual SD Card slots so I'm going to write copies of the image to both cards, I'd don't work professionally, but I'd still hate to lose some of my shots.

None, but I know a few who dropped theirs while taking it out the camera

In my experience from only trusting new cards the only failure has been attributed to my own stupidity. Most recently I went on a hour long hike, at a butterfly festival, shooting away, with no card in my camera. 🤦🏼‍♂️

You don't need a second card slot.......until you need it. But seriously I've never had a card fail on me in (photography use) in 10+ years. I now have cameras with dual slots because I can't risk losing photos and "one is non two is one" thing applies specially on this. I just change cards when I upgrade cameras every 2-3 or so years specially when cameras need faster and faster cards