First time for everything I guess... while at a wedding today I dumped a 4 gig Hitachi microdrive into my powerbook. I inadvertently pulled the card before it fully downloaded resulting in about 200 images corrupting. After about 2 hours of nail biting I was able to recover the data thanks for a nice little program I downloaded off www.datarescue.com
I just thought I'd share this info with my fellow photographers out there. $49 and i got the bundled mac and pc version of this software. I would have paid a thousand! any others out there with similar experience? or would anyone out there recommend not using micro drives and using cf cards instead?
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Whew! Good thing you recovered your files! I have a similar program called Image Recall that has saved my butt a few times as well.

Call me old fashioned, but all of those tiny moving parts inside microdrives really scare me. I have also heard more horror stories with microdrives than with CF cards. Once I made the move to Lexar 2GB CF cards, I've never looked back (and I have much more confidence in the reliability of my cards).

Some photographers suggest not buying cards over 512MB or 1GB just in case something happens to the whole card. They have a valid point, but I'm afraid that if I juggle too many CF cards at a wedding, something is bound to happen to one of them.

For me, right now, 2GB CF cards are working. If your system is working well for you, then stick with it.

Regards,

Brian

I switched from microdrives to CF and SD cards a while back too. Since I shoot RAW, the 2GB cards are really the only option although I too can appreciate how much of a bummer it would be to lose a whole cards worth of images.

Bottom line: Avoid the microdrives when you just can't lose those images.

Stoked you were able to recover!!

Yeah, that's a scary story, and from my experience, what happened to you could have happened whether it was a CF card or a Microdrive. Pulling either device out of a reader too early can be iffy on either medium. I've never owned a microdrive because of too many horror stories out there, and honestly, the cf cards can just hold up to soooo much abuse.
Check out this article on a cf card that made it through an explosion
I had a teacher at school who regularly did experiments on cf cards to see just how much abuse they could handle. I think the nuttiest experiment I know he did was to fill a card up with images, and then to leave the card in the pocket of his pants, and then put them through the washer machine. Then he let the cards air dry, and what do you know, they worked flawlessly afterwards.
I know I've had a cf card go bad on me, but was super thankful when I was able to use a recovery progam similar to those mentioned above to save every image of my last shoot, and also about another 3 shoots worth of images from before that (note that I fill my card every time I shoot, and I format every time I put it back in the camera, and this program was able to recover full images that had been formatted over several times.)

WOW! Glad you were able to recover them. I think that might be the greatest reason for the new WiFi devices! Instant backups and much more cost effective than buying those little 1 gig cards to mirror your CF cards.

Tim - that story is awesome and that pic is super cool! Who gets the photo credit on that?

I thought Lexar cards were the only worthwhile ones, but that's a good endorsement for Sandisk