And Steam just released their Steam Year in Review. Here's mine:


https://store.steampowered.com/yearinreview/76561198000983922/2023

The query was prompted by talking to someone who couldn't get her photos off an SD card.  She'd been constantly re-using the card that came with the camera, and hadn't copied any of the files off it for quite a while.  When she did try, neither she nor her husband could retrieve anything, it looked like everything had been deleted.  At that point I thought of undelete utilities, as a hedge against problems. In their case the problem was worse, and probably insurmountable, as both their computers eventually said the card was corrupted.  I'd guess that even forensic IT might struggle to get anything useful from a corrupted card.  There's a moral in there somewhere...

-rjbull (December 08, 2023, 04:46 PM)

That sounds like it could be a fake SD card. Where it's actually got very small storage but the vendor/scammer changed the firmware so it reports that it's very large. You can write all you want to it but it's constantly overwriting the data, which probably uses up the write cycles of the flash memory pretty quickly.

These days you should always test flash cards you buy online to verify they are the advertised capacity. You can use a utility like f3 (Fight Fake Flash, or Fight Flash Fraud) to do so.