In our high-tech time, digital cameras are no longer a luxury, they can be purchased by anyone who has a desire to master the profession of the photographer.
With the help of the most simple modern camera you can take pictures of high quality, and moreover, you can even shoot video in Full HD format.
So, thanks to modern electronic inventions, everyone now can become a photographer and even a video producer.
We try to capture all the brightest moments of life, shooting during holidays or travels, and what to say about all of our favorite selfies...
Even a simple amateur photographer can take dozens of gigabytes of pictures. And all this stuff is stored not only on the hard drive of desktop computer, but also on memory cards of various brands, which is installed in cameras and smartphones.
In this article we will consider the theme of data security, namely, how to be sure that your photos and videos are not damaged as a result of improper use of the flash card, and what to do if you accidentally deleted files from the USB flash drive.
What do you know about flash memory?
Flash memory was originally created to store microprograms in computer chips, but later it turned out that it is convenient for moving information between various devices and is ideal for portable electronics.
Sure, memory cards have got a small size and weight, they consume a little power during high speed read-write operations, and have got high reliability for such devices.
Nevertheless, there are also disadvantages: the sensitivity to voltage fluctuations during operation, as well as the presence of a so-called "limited resource" - some maximum value of the number of reads and writes of one memory cell.
Hardware failure - how to avoid?
Recover of data after a failure in the work of electronics is possible only in the computer service, they will help you but it will be quite expensive.
You can, of course, look for a special program and try to do everything yourself and for free. But in such cases, as a rule, it is possible to restore everything, except for that is necessary...
If you decide to perform data recovery yourself, be careful and use only proven and reliable data recovery programs.
It is better to take care of the safety of photos, videos and any other files on the flash drive in advance.
To do this, we will follow several rules:
- 1. Do not defragment the flash drive, because the random spread of fragments of files in memory will only help to increase the life time of your device.
Eventually, the process of defragmentation, consisting of many sequential read and write operations, will lead to an earlier deterioration of the drive's memory.
- 2. Try not to connect the USB flash drive together with other devices to the computer via USB hubs that have not got their own power source.
This will prevent the occurrence of voltage drops, that is critical for the memory chip, and, as a rule, lead to hardware failures.
- 3. Avoid placing working program folders on flash drives, as well as directly editing files located on the flash drive, for example, with text or image editors.
Copy the files first to your hard drive. It also provides for programs a much higher speed of access to files than when working with a removable disk.
- 4. Never interrupt the process of reading or writing information on a memory card, do not remove the card from the connector port, if you just changed your decision about copying a large file.
Always use the secure ejection mode, using the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon on the task bar. The word "secure" in this context indicates the safety of your data.
- 5. And the last thing, the simplest rule is the new flash drive is more reliable than the old one.
Buy a new SD card for your camera or smartphone at least 10th class (this means the speed of writing to the card is about 10 MB/sec.), and all your selfies will be in complete integrity.
Accidental deletion of files - what to do?
If you have deleted your photos or video files by mistake, when the storage medium is working OK, the probability of successful recovery is almost 100%, the main thing is to notice the time when the files are disappeared.
In this situation the features of the operating system of our device will help us.
All devices, whether a computer, laptop or digital camera in the process of removing files from their drives act on the same algorithm.
When you press the "Delete" button, the operating system simply marks the file as deleted, and the space in the memory that this file has allocated is considered free and available for recording when the device continues to work.
So, if you just find out that your multimedia files are lost, do not panic, calmly turn off the camera and do not take new pictures.
Also, you should not delete or add new files to the disk, since in this case the information on the card may be overwritten and subsequent recovery simply will not give a good result.