Lessons From Losing a Week of Photos to Memory Card Failure

This was interesting to read about losing a week’s worth of photos from a memory card failure. I have had my own woes with memory cards and USB drives failing without backups being done. The costs are quite prohibitive for restoring hardware failures as indicated in the piece. The main lessons are getting many cards (reading negative reviews to judge failure rate), backup often and use a camera with dual card slots.

Some negative customer reviews are frivolous because they are rooted in user error, or because they concern themselves with delivery rather than the product’s quality or performance. However, negative reviews are generally more significant than positive reviews.

If you think that one shouldn’t focus on the negative while the vast majority of reviews are positive, consider that on Amazon, the average rating for a product is 4.4 (out of 5) as found here by analyzing 7 million reviews. Even a product with an average 4.0 rating (4-star) is below average. The large majority of products are rated above 4.0, so the difference between a great product and a subpar product is less than 1 (star) on average. On the other hand, we’ve just seen that the number of 1-star reviews for different cards varies by a factor of four.

Read the whole article.