The Lemon Fool

I've had a 32MB micro SD card in an android tablet for a couple of years or more, and a few days ago access to it was lost - the photos on it didn't show in the thumbnails, and it wasn't shown in the file manager. I rebooted, took it out and cleaned the contacts, still not recognised. I've now tried it in the micro SD slot on a laptop, and via an adapter in an old desktop. Not recognised by either.

Do I assume it's dead and irrecoverable? Do micro SD cards suddenly fail completely with no warning?

MyNameIsUrl wrote:Do I assume it's dead and irrecoverable? Do micro SD cards suddenly fail completely with no warning?

When the fail, and they do, you get no warning.

I'm not saying that you might not be lucky and able to recover some data, just don't rely upon SD's to continue working as long as you would like.

Urbandreamer wrote:

MyNameIsUrl wrote:Do I assume it's dead and irrecoverable? Do micro SD cards suddenly fail completely with no warning?

When the fail, and they do, you get no warning.

I'm not saying that you might not be lucky and able to recover some data, just don't rely upon SD's to continue working as long as you would like.

Yup that's about the rub of it.
There are some aspects in how SD cards work that make them a bit risky in this regard; bloody convenient tiny bits of data storage, but that comes with a downside.

There were recommendations on this thread for some recovery software

I think if you slide the "write protect" switch on the caddy that holds the micro SD in an SD slot you can attempt these without worrying that you will make it worse.

MyNameIsUrl wrote:I've had a 32MB micro SD card in an android tablet for a couple of years or more...

I use them in my camera, load the pics into the PC and erase the card each time.
Some of the eight cards I have are probably 15 years old. One has failed so far, couldn't be read.

I wouldn't regard them as any sort of permanent storage medium.

V8

88V8 wrote:...I wouldn't regard them as any sort of permanent storage medium.

V8

Agreed, and add USB flash sticks to that list. These things are cheap for a reason...

Part of any backup plan should be to make sure any external storage is backed up elsewhere to a 'robust' medium - preferably at least one onsite copy and one offsite ( e.g cloud - E2E encrypted if needs be). With cloud you'll be getting versioning and enterprise level RAID (e.g ZFS) - hard to duplicate in the home without spending some serious money on a decent business grade NAS.

https://www.sync.com/

Thanks for the replies. Data recovery is not the issue - I sometimes transfer a few holiday snaps to the tablet, but the 'originals' are elsewhere. I wanted to educate myself on whether I could have prevented this failure or at least seen it coming. It seems not, but never mind, a replacement card is probably less than a tenner. Thanks for the suggestion of Recuva but I couldn't use it as the card wasn't detected - it really does seem to be totally inert.

MyNameIsUrl wrote:Thanks for the replies. Data recovery is not the issue - I sometimes transfer a few holiday snaps to the tablet, but the 'originals' are elsewhere. I wanted to educate myself on whether I could have prevented this failure or at least seen it coming. It seems not, but never mind, a replacement card is probably less than a tenner. Thanks for the suggestion of Recuva but I couldn't use it as the card wasn't detected - it really does seem to be totally inert.

My Chromebook will flash up an alert if I even brush the SDXC card in it (it's a flush fit), so I'd imagine that mechanical issues play a part in potential card failure.
More seriously I suppose you could damage the slot itself by leaving cards in full time, a much greater expense to fix.
You can get cheap silicon rubber plugs on Amazon for all the various ports to stop them getting clogged with dust et al. Handy for phones that tend to live in lint infested pockets...

Infrasonic wrote: Handy for phones that tend to live in lint infested pockets...

fess up time, I ruined a phone by popping into my top pocket in a shirt while listening to music
now it's Bluetooth and no longer wires it still goes into the same pocket but upside down