Corrupted SD card. Safe to use again?

Hey hows it going? So Ive been getting into photography lately and somehow I've corrupted two different SD cards. With each card, I ran some recovery software and recovered just about every picture without an issue. My question is, once I reformat the card, is the card safe to use again, i.e., will the card that has been corrupted once be more likely to corrupt again. I'm thinking it is no more likely than a card that has never been corrupted, but I'm still hesitant to reuse the card.

Thoughts? Thanks.

It all depends on what is causing corruption. Do you know if the cards are legitimate? I know there are places that will "forge" a larger card from a smaller one, and once you write enough data, the end wraps around to the beginning and whoops corruption. Testing for this is easy: plug it into your computer, start copying data, wait for it to get full or corrupt.

If the cards work, were they in a similar device? It may be corrupting the cards.

You may have also received two duds, however unlikely. As long as the cards themselves are not the issue, formatting will make them usable again.

Hmmm... Interesting about the illegitimate cards. Thanks for the info.

I know one of the cards came from Amazon in their 'frustration free packaging' but before it got to amazon, not sure where it came from. The other card is a different brand and size and I got it a couple of years ago. Never was an issue before, but just recently started using a lot more.

Both happened while transferring pictures taken with a different camera and even transferring to a different computer - once with "card A" (pictures taken with "camera A") at my work and the second time was with "card B" (pictures taken with "camera B") at my home computer.

Both times, however, I was using an el cheapo reader. Both were one of the USB type that read only SD cards that you can get from Microcenter for a couple of bucks. I have several of these readers and I'm fairly sure it wasn't the same reader both times, but I'll stop using them altogether and see if it happens again.

Thanks again.

I'm assuming that you're properly ejecting (unmounting) the cards before you remove them from the reader. In my work flow that's the most likely spot where the cards could be corrupted. I've used one of those cheap USB readers and never had any difficulty but H/W wise it seems like they would be the weakest link in the chain. It's a puzzlement! There doesn't seem to be anything common between the two cards except for procedure. OTOH it is possible that corruption starts and cascades as you use the card before it becomes obvious.

One thing to try is to format the cards in camera. If the camera does anything unusual with the format you cover that possibility by using in camera format. This is borderline superstitious but standards conformance is not always 100%.

Yes, I'm unmounting the cards before I remove them.

Interesting that you mention to format the cards in the camera. After I recovered the photos, formatted on my PC, and re-inserted the cards into the cameras, the cameras both gave me errors when I tried to take a photo. I had to reformat the card in the camera before I was able to save a photo.

Who knows, maybe I just really unlucky and had it happen randomly twice within a week or so of one another. The cards are both working now, I'm just leary of leaving photos on them for long.

Thanks for the reply.