I am a professional photographer and had to do a job on a motorcycle trip abroad, so could not use my normal D800 and heavy pro lenses, so bought a brand new Lumix LX100 and SanDisk card. The camera performed very well and am very please with it. The photographs were part of an article I was writing for a magazine and the dead line was urgent.
Imagine my joy when I plugged the SD card into the PC card reader to find all the file names had turned to nonsense! I took the card to an IT expert and he said he had seen this before with SanDisk products. Using skillful data recovery he saved my work. In my panic I had forgotten to bring a data stick so he sold me a SanDisk one. He copied the rescued files from his PC to the data stick, stuck in it another PC to check and the same corruption happened! He said this is not the first time this has occurred with these data sticks! In the end I plumped for safety and he burned the valuable data to a DVD for me.
Whilst in his premises another customer reported the self same issue and had been persuaded to buy a data recover package from SanDisk.
As a professional, I need to be able to rely on the equipment I use - I thought SanDisk was a manufacturer of professional products one could reply on. A quick google search tells me I am not alone. Much of the profit from this job has been lost to data recovery, not to mention time and stress levels. I notice from SanDisks lengthy Ts & Cs that they are only willing to be responsible for the hardware itself, not the resultant damage of it’s failure.
Not Happy!
no storage manufacturer warrants the data on the product. only the product it self is covered by the warranty. this goes for any storage product from HDD to tape drives and everything in between.
what you have experienced is actually pretty rare. having the same issue occur with 2 different cards back to back is not something that happens often. sandisk cards are among the best quality products that can be purchased.
that being said it seems there may be something else in the mix that may be causing the issue. the fact that the card works in the camera and the data can be recovered successfully seems to point to the card working ok. the actual data was not damaged or corrupted. if it was data recovery would only recover corrupted data. what kind of card reader are you using? the card reader may be the issue and could be not reading the card correctly. you can test by using the camera as a card reader. if images can be captured and viewed on the camera connect the camera to the computer and use it as the reader. if the images appear normally on the computer when using the camera as a reader your card reader may be causing the issue.
I simply took the card form the camera and inserted it into the card reader on my high end workstation. There is nothing wrong with the card reader - as a professional photographer this card reader is used frequently. Once the card had been inserted into the PC the file names were trashed and turned into a mixture of unreadable files and folders. See attached screen shot. When I returned the card to the camera the files were no longer readable, but the camera was willing to write new files. The contents of the card are unreadable whether the card is put in the cardreader, the camera or conecting the camera to the PC!
When in the IT shop the guy said that he had seen this happen on a number of occasions with SanDisk data sticks. As I said earlier he opened a brand new one, copied the recovered files to it on one machine and then transfered the stick to another machine to confirm that the files were all there and the data stick did exactly the same trick as had happened with my SD card.
I have just taken a number of other cards from other cameras and inserted them in the card reader on my workstation and all are fine. I have taken another make of card, stuck it in my new camera taken a picture and inserted this in the card reader and that also works. To me the evidence points at a card problem and the question is, is it systemic or are there a bad batch of chips that have come from your chinese factory?
To reitterate, another customer in the IT shop had suffered the same problem as I did and when he contacted SanDisk the sold him a software licence for a year to save his data. Given in my situation, this is clearly a card fault, the IT expert’s opinion as well as mine, surely SanDisk should provide the necessary software to save data free.
The serial number of this card is BM1704950820D. Given you are selling these cards to professionals as a premium product I would have assumed that you would want to get to the bottom of what seems to be far from an issolated fault.
sansik does not sell the data reocvery software. it come free with professional line cards and if you do not ahve one of those you can purchase it from their third party partner LC Technologies.
I have been using sandisk cards for many years and never seen this issue with any card. Like I said before for you to ahve the issue with multiple cards is very rare.
can you post some pictures of the card? front and back? I have heard of similar issues with fake cards. maybe someone here could take a look and authenticate the cards. This is a user forum though so if you are looking for an official answer from sandisk contact their support.
My mistake; your handle said you were a SanDisk guru, so I assumed you worked for SanDisk.
I think that I do need to take this up with SanDisk as I am not a happy puppy.
Cheers
Ralph
