How to lose 16GB of your digital life, Just like that!

I’ve been using a 16GB Micro SDHC card in my Nokia N82 and it’s been less than a year yet. I have been very happy with the performance and obviously the capacity. Then it started behaving a little weird. The read and write times were taking way more than normal and when listening to music, I could hear the music hanging every now and then.

I thought I’ve not formatted my phone for a long time and so many software and data on the phone, its being over loaded. I never realized that my beloved memory card is misbehaving. One fine evening I was taking a macro-closeup of a crawling insect that my phone actually clogged, hanged and got stuck right after the photo was taken. I waited several minutes but the phone did not come back. Only thing I could do was to pull the battery and boot it again.

To my highly unpleasant surprise, the phone worked just fine but the memory card never came back. I’ve tried all the card readers, phones, converters, jackets and means to try to get it back up and running but no luck so far.

What did I lose?

I have been so confident about these memory cards that I take backups only when they get filled up. And filling up a Sandisk’s 16GB Micro SDHC for a smart phone is not that common. As a result, not only I lost the card but I lost my past 6 months of photos, videos and other stuff like music and video collection that I used to carry on my phone all the time. Alas!

Lesson learnt:

Always take backups 🙂

Moreover, despite my efforts the card never came back and I had to end up downgrading to my 8GB card that continues to work fine so far.

Another Lesson Learnt
Always keep a backup storage medium. If you primary storage fails, you are up and running on the backup.

Yet another lesson learnt
Whenever you find your storage media or related devices working unusually slow or even differently, at least take a backup of your data!

I’ve learnt these lessons the hard way. I hope you learn them from my experience!