Today I had a discussion with a videographer regarding his high speed compact flash cards (CF) that he was going to be using on an upcoming video project. He was looking to take some preventive measures ahead of time to make sure everything went smoothly and he was prepared in case disaster struck with any media card errors or failure.
In preparation for his shoot he had 16 compact flash media cards that he was testing. Since it was a large and very important shoot, he wanted to make sure he had no flash media card errors or failures occur. He had been referred by B&H photo to use digital picture recovery software to test his digital camera cards with.
After he installed Klix digital picture recovery software, he began the testing process. He had 8 flash media cards that were testing bad using our software Klix. Klix has a feature that allows you to test your digital camera media cards to see if they are ok to use (or if they exhibit any underlying issues which may cause problems during a project).
Klix has two types of tests available: Sequential Test and Random Test. You can choose which type of test in the Preferences window as well as the number of passes that you want to run. These tests will overwrite all of the data on your card, so make sure that your data is transferred from your card before beginning a test.
The Sequential Test will fill the entire media card with data sequentially and then reads and checks the entire media card. It will verify the data that was written to what was read. The test will run until it finds an error or until it has completed the specified number of passes.
The Random Test will write and read data to the media card of random size and position. In order to get a complete media check using the Random Test, use a minimum of 2 passes in the Preferences.
I had him repeat these tests just for redundancy because, these compact flash cards are expensive cards to be replaced (credit Laura | DressHead). I also mentioned that if he did experience any flash media error or failure, Picture Rescue can recover pictures/videos from a deleted, reformatted or corrupted digital media cards.
He was glad to find out that the cards were bad now and not while using the compact flash cards during or after shooting his videos. It is a good idea to take preventative measures for your data to make sure you don’t jeopardize your valuable data and run the risk of having to perform data recovery.