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Why are SD cards too fragile?

Most of us have several memory cards (SD, CFExpress, whatever) and most of us also use at least three methods of backing up/archiving our photographic images.

I use iCloud for very little, so can't help with that. I do, however, have redundant backups of my important data, which includes documents, music, movies, etc., and my photographic files. One set of backups is in my safe deposit box at the bank, and I swap that out monthly. Another set here at home is the "working set," so to speak, and just today I did the weekly update of the images that I shot this past week. I handle things manually. Some people use a NAS for their backups, some use Time Machine, but I have not chosen either of those processes.
 
Clix Pix said:
Most of us have several memory cards (SD, CFExpress, whatever) and most of us also use at least three methods of backing up/archiving our photographic images.

I use iCloud for very little, so can't help with that. I do, however, have redundant backups of my important data, which includes documents, music, movies, etc., and my photographic files. One set of backups is in my safe deposit box at the bank, and I swap that out monthly. Another set here at home is the "working set," so to speak, and just today I did the weekly update of the images that I shot this past week. I handle things manually. Some people use a NAS for their backups, some use Time Machine, but I have not chosen either of those processes.
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Why not time machine?
 
jwolf6589 said:
Two backups of my data? Hmm a good idea. ? Hmm can I use my i cloud drive to store a copy of my canon photo library? Bad idea as my photo library is 35GB!!!!
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Costco has 2TB USB3.0 Seagate hard drives for $74.00. These and others hard drives are compatible with both Windows 7 and higher, and Mac 10.11 and higher. Have one hard drive to backup your computer using Time Machine, or SuperDuper, or CCC. And another hard drive to save your photos and other files.

Anyway, take my advise with a grain of salt. You should do what you wish to do instead, since the answers to the subjects talked about on this thread are readily available on the Internet.
 
AlaskaMoose said:
Costco has 2TB USB3.0 Seagate hard drives for $74.00. These and others hard drives are compatible with both Windows 7 and higher, and Mac 10.11 and higher. Have one hard drive to backup your computer using Time Machine, or SuperDuper, or CCC. And another hard drive to save your photos and other files.

Anyway, take my advise with a grain of salt. You should do what you wish to do instead.
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Or what I can afford. I don’t make much.
 
AlaskaMoose said:
Costco has 2TB USB3.0 Seagate hard drives for $74.00. These and others hard drives are compatible with both Windows 7 and higher, and Mac 10.11 and higher. Have one hard drive to backup your computer using Time Machine, or SuperDuper, or CCC. And another hard drive to save your photos and other files.

Anyway, take my advise with a grain of salt. You should do what you wish to do instead, since the answers to the subjects talked about on this thread are readily available on the Internet.
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You think I trust everything I read on the web? Do you know how many times I have been misled with a Google search?
 
jwolf6589 said:
You think I trust everything I read on the web? Do you know how many times I have been misled with a Google search?
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1. How can anybody in this forum provide the right answer to your comments and questions? For example, you say that "you don't make much," but as I read the number of Apple products you own, it leads me to believe that you in fact "make" enough to afford buying a 2TB hard drive at Costco or anywhere else:

Your list:
Macbook Pro 2020 (1TB SSD) | iPad Mini 5 (256GB)
iPhone 12 (128GB) | Apple Watch series 4 (16GB) | Apple TV HD (32GB)
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2. Right here on your thread, you are reading stuff posted on the Internet. So it means that you not only trust (or don't trust) whatever you read on the web, but you add to it. By the way, regardless if you use Google or any other search engine, you are "misleading" yourself. The result of an "online search" is proportional to the words you type on your keyboard. The search engine responds to your "commands." The Internet is not an individual who has a brain to think for you.
 
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jwolf6589 said:
Why not time machine?
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It just doesn't work for my preferred style of backing up my images.

In all honesty, while I enjoy photography, have loved it for many, many years, and get great pleasure out of shooting various subjects and sharing some images and carefully backing up everything, this is all really for my own amusement and to keep myself engaged in something interesting on a daily basis. My images are certainly not in the realm of anything anyone would consider high quality, worthy of hanging on gallery walls, and I doubt that I could ever reach that level, which never has been a goal in the first place.

In the long run, with the exception of some early family photos in albums of actual prints, my photos and digital image files are not going to matter one way or another anyway when eventually I shuffle off this mortal coil, as I can already guess that my relatives will not be interested and more than likely someone will hit the "erase" button on it all.....

However, for now I'm still backing up my images three ways to Sunday just because I can and feel that at least for me, it's important.
 
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I've used Sandisk SD cards since 2006. Probably 30-40 of them between various cameras. Not a single failure. I don't use them for permanent storage though. Copy to external drives, then reformat after every shoot.
 
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Buck987 said:
I think that is considered past tech by many now.
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Time Machine seems to work pretty well, not sure what you mean by that. I have it set to backup to two drives, one USB and one NAS. I also use Backblaze in case there's a house fire (or forest fire ?) that causes me to lose everything, but for normal use (like reinstalling the OS or upgrading computers) I've never had any issues just using Time Machine.

To the topic of failing drives I'll say if you never delete images from your SD card and just buy a new one when it fills up, it's incredibly unlikely you'll ever have an SD card fail. Sure it can happen, but as long as you're buying reputable brands from a reputable vendor (which is not Amazon, there are plenty of counterfeit SanDisk there unfortunately) it's just not likely to fail.
 
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kenoh said:
OK, so in response to the last paragraph, I work in IT I KNOW I am correct about data archival. You have limited experience with this memory format as a light consumer relative to others on here.

Speaking from experience, doing firmware upgrades to servers in data centres using an SD card was fun. You would typically get through about 80 servers before the card either snapped from being badly handled or the data started to fail when read. 80 servers sounds good but then you have 70,000 of them to get done, then you need a better solution.

One of the systems I worked on for a well known Telecom company used to have 14 DLT tape drives to back up the production systems every night. Capacity wise it needed 9. The other 6 were there because at least 2 would fail most nights. Funny enough, this company paid so much in hardware maintenance contracts that the hardware manufacturer employed an engineer to sit onsite at the customer just in case so when things broke he was already there to get them fixed. When you have 70,000 servers then something always breaks.

Archival storage mediums have a guaranteed storage life of 30 years+

The issue with SD cards is like the other posters said, it could be years, could be never but It may also be tomorrow when that card fails - ever pull out the card without ejecting it first? Bad idea. If it is still writing to memory you can corrupt data. If you have, you know how easy that is to do. This of course also applies to USB hard drives. If you kill the power before it has written the cache to the disk, it is gone
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If you have 70,000 servers to update and you rely on physically using an SD card for this, then you have far bigger organizational problems than SD-card longevity!

At that scale, everything needs to be remotely accessible and able to deploy updates at scale from external network storage. Can't some sort of ILOM function do this?
 
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mackmgg said:
Time Machine seems to work pretty well, not sure what you mean by that. I have it set to backup to two drives, one USB and one NAS. I also use Backblaze in case there's a house fire (or forest fire ?) that causes me to lose everything, but for normal use (like reinstalling the OS or upgrading computers) I've never had any issues just using Time Machine.

To the topic of failing drives I'll say if you never delete images from your SD card and just buy a new one when it fills up, it's incredibly unlikely you'll ever have an SD card fail. Sure it can happen, but as long as you're buying reputable brands from a reputable vendor (which is not Amazon, there are plenty of counterfeit SanDisk there unfortunately) it's just not likely to fail.
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Bought mine from Best BUY all San Disk.
 
SD cards are cheap storage that still has to be fast enough to store photos in near real time as they stream in from a DSLR or 4k video recording.

  • Cheap
  • Fast
  • Reliable

You get to pick two as a trade-off for pretty much any storage medium.

SD cards picked cheap and fast (well, within their price range). SSDs pick fast and reliable, hard drives are cheap and reliable (relatively speaking).

If you're relying on an SD card for long term storage you're probably making a mistake.
 
throAU said:
SD cards are cheap storage that still has to be fast enough to store photos in near real time as they stream in from a DSLR or 4k video recording.

  • Cheap
  • Fast
  • Reliable

You get to pick two as a trade-off for pretty much any storage medium.

SD cards picked cheap and fast (well, within their price range). SSDs pick fast and reliable, hard drives are cheap and reliable (relatively speaking).

If you're relying on an SD card for long term storage you're probably making a mistake.
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Dont use a DSLR and don't record in 4K (Camcorder cant shoot at that res anyways). I shoot in standard HD, although Canon can shoot in Full HD. Just a few years back everyone was using video tapes (mini DV, VHS-C, etc..) to record video in much lower resolutions, so to me standard HD is wonderful.
 
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jwolf6589 said:
Dont use a DSLR and don't record in 4K (Camcorder cant shoot at that res anyways). I shoot in standard HD, although Canon can shoot in Full HD. Just a few years back everyone was using video tapes (mini DV, VHS-C, etc..) to record video in much lower resolutions, so to me standard HD is wonderful.
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Doesn't really matter; the point being that SD cards are built down to a price to do a job, and reliability is not a top priority. Thus relying on them without proper backups is not a good idea.

It's the nature of the job they do - they're intended to be cheap, fast enough and relatively disposable. This is why they aren't the most reliable storage media.
 
Fomalhaut said:
If you have 70,000 servers to update and you rely on physically using an SD card for this, then you have far bigger organizational problems than SD-card longevity!

At that scale, everything needs to be remotely accessible and able to deploy updates at scale from external network storage. Can't some sort of ILOM function do this?
Click to expand...

Nope, Some updates and “uniquely secure” environments unfortunately require someone vetted to be physically in front of each machine with a card with proven provenance. Thankfully this was not every time. Lights out is great 99.9% of the time since it was developed. I am old and so my days in the operations trenches are thankfully past. Having said this, I don’t know your background but you would be amazed at the number of customers we talk to that still do more manual labour than they need to. Further with the economic viability of ML and the sophistication of automation we can achieve today, then the complexity of tasks that can now be automated is quite impressive - assuming of course the logic can be distilled into the automation engine.

Sorry wandered off there….
 
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