Under the Desktop: Hold or Fold Your Photo Flash Cards?

CreativePro Staff

A careless brush of my elbow the other day — a frequent occurrence I admit — sent a bunch of media cards flying around my desk. The deja vu of that moment sparked some concerns about the way creative professionals use their digital-camera memory cards and their expectations for long-term storage of their data.

At the same time, I recalled another stack of media that used to get knocked just as regularly. Not the teeny-weeny flash memory cards, but a stack of Zip cartridges. Of course, now that I think of it, I used to have the same dexterity problems with tall piles of floppy diskettes in the good old days.

Creative professionals have always used removable media, whether to pass around images via sneakernet or to keep projects at hand in case a client calls to reuse some random image or layout. Like many of you, I still have a lot of data stored on those Zip diskettes, although now they’re placed on an out-of-the-way shelf. I hardly ever use them.

That could become a problem for my files depending on the age of a particular cartridge, the conditions around its storage, the age of the drive that it will be used, and my neglect. If the cartridge is old, the data or the directory information may become corrupted. Heat and other environmental factors can affect reliability over time. If the drive has some problem and doesn’t work properly, then the cartridge may be unreadable the next time you insert it in the drive.

Most of us understand these caveats about removable storage. Or we think we do based on our experience with previous removable storage technologies.

But what about flash cards and our use of these formats? Are there any special concerns for professional content creators?

Archive vs. Backup
Before heading into the topic at hand, let’s take a brief detour to define some pertinent storage terminology. What’s the difference between backup and archive for digital storage?

As I’ve discussed in previous columns, a backup saves a copy of your data files as well as items needed for your workflow, such as preferences and aliases, to another place. This can be a volume across the network, another hard drive, or a piece of removable media. The backup can even be a remote server on the Internet. These redundant copies can protect your data from loss through corruption or computer malfunction or if the dog chews up your hard drive.

According to Don Chouinard, director of marketing at backup software vendor Dantz Development Corp., the “mechanics of doing a backup and archiving data can be similar.” In the case of archive, after the data is moved to the backup media, it’s deleted from its original location.

“Archiving data is to save critical data that is required for the long-term success of a company. But [the data] is accessed infrequently and not needed for daily business activities. Typical uses of archiving include moving completed client projects to off-line media, or storing end-of-year financials long-term for possible audits,” he said

Yet, at a recent open-studio tour, I spoke with a digital photographer who mentioned he was using some of his flash media, especially the older lower-capacity cards, to hold old photos. This was preferable he said to “clogging up” his hard disk with his many images.

From our talk, I judged that the photographer was using the media cards as an ad hoc archive. This is understandable, since the cards are convenient and often considered to be more robust than the usual rotating storage. In some ways, this usage is similar to how we dealt with film negatives. After all, flash vendors such as SanDisk Corp. call their media “digital film.” We put them in a box and think we’ve done good.

Moreover, this photographer is treating his hard disk as if it’s a physical filing cabinet. No doubt there was plenty of capacity for his data on the drive (and even if it was loaded, he could have easily spent a $100 for a hard drive). Instead, I bet he is more comfortable locating images on a piece of removable media than finding a particular file among the many thousands of others on a hard disk volume. He can remember that the card is in a certain box or place, and it has a red label.

Of course, that media card is not film.

Not All Flash and Glitter
While these cards pack a lot of data into a small space, they present some technical and market concerns when used for long-term archival storage.

On the technical side, all types of flash memory have a limited life expectancy, which isn’t related to a particular time span. Instead, it’s measured in the number of read/write cycles the piece of media can handle. Flash technology is designed to be read from more than written to.

Once that read/write threshold is reached on a memory cell, it will balk at further writes. Sometimes the cell’s function will slow down, also causing trouble. Many cards support 100,000 cycles, which sounds like a lot, and can be depending on your use of the card. Some cards support an even greater number of cycles. Still, the threshold is a statistically derived number, so in the real world, your result with a particular card will vary.

In addition, the action of the reader or camera’s firmware can make a difference. In the early days of flash media, some system-related data were stored in the same location. Some parts of the card were used constantly while others were hardly touched, thus reducing the life of the card. Manufacturers have developed a variety of schemes to spread out data on the cards.

“I am sure that people are storing these cards, but they must realize the NAND Flash Memory component is not designed for archiving purposes,” advised Joseph Unsworth, Gartner analyst for semiconductor memories. “That is better left to CDs.” (Note: NAND is the name for the most common architecture used in consumer flash memory cards. The other scheme is called NOR. They look like acronyms but I believe they stem from memory gate terminology.)

Worse, in my view is the questionable sustainability and continued support by camera vendors and manufacturers for the many formats currently on the market. It is a very confusing situation right now. There seems to be a new format introduced every couple of months resulting in the increased sales of card readers that support multiple formats (see Figure 1). There are some eight different formats on the market.

For example, SanDisk late last month announced it began selling miniSD (Secure Digital) cards in Japan. These thumbnail-sized cards range from 32MB to 256MB, and will be used in forthcoming cameras and other consumer electronic devices (see Figure 2). There are readers specifically designed for the cards, or in this case, customers can fit the media into an adapter for use in a standard SD Card slot.

As Unsworth said, the CD-R/RW format is a better choice for archiving your images, especially CD-R, which has been around for a long time and has reached critical mass with users. This format will be sustained for many years to come, it’s supported by the DVD readers that now are supplanting CD burners in the market.

The makers of CD-R discs claim that the media has a life span of 100 years, which by any reasonable measure is absurd (and will be the grist for a future column on the archival theme). However, CD-R discs will be readable in 10 years time and there will be drives around the office that will read it.

Flash Tips
If something does go wrong with one of your flash cards, there are services that can recover data. Or they will attempt to do so for a price. Most said that their success rates are around 90 percent.

The price of recovery services are based on the capacity of the media, starting between $40 to $60 for an 8MB card and ranging upwards to $180, not counting the shipping and handling costs.

Sites such as Flash Fixers and Flash Media 911 warned users not to attempt to use common file recovery utilities on the cards, even if they can be seen or recognized by the programs. The programs often will write to the card and garble the actual image data, making the service’s recovery process more difficult or impossible.

In addition, the services warned that several cameras overwrite data when formatting cards, including all Fujifilm Fujifilm models; the Olympus America D-100, C-700, C-3040; and the Sony Electronics Cyber-shot DSC-P5. Overwritten images can’t be recovered.

Here are a couple of tips from the recovery guys:

Bloat is bad. Don’t fill up the memory card before downloading the pictures. This is good advice for any digital storage device: Always leave a good amount of room.

Patience is golden. Don’t be in a hurry to remove the card from the camera after taking an image, or to shut off the camera while it’s writing data. Same difference with your card reader — don’t remove the card from the reader until it has finished communicating with your computer.

Static shock. Static electricity can kill a card, so be very careful handling cards in dry, low-humidity conditions.

Such practices will help preserve your images intact. As the 12th Century philosopher Jedaia Ben Bedersi observed: “Man regrets the past, is anxious about the present, and is concerned for the future.” Content creators must be wary for their images and for the storage of their images.

Read more by David Morgenstern