Data loss hurts. Since most of the stuff I do is digital, it’s almost synonymous to losing valued notebooks, journals, and photo albums on which you’ve invested much time and effort to chronicle your thoughts and your life.
It took me a while before I decided to hop on the smart phone bandwagon. I waited quite a while before I decided to go for the Samsung Galaxy S4 when it was time for me to renew my mobile plan.
I was pretty happy with it for several months and never really had any issue with it. I love Android and how I can customize it to my whim and I pretty much synchronized all my digital data in it.
I have the 16GB model and since the operating system took nearly half of the storage, I placed a 32 GB Kingston SD Class 4 card in it to store documents and pictures. The 13 megapixel camera eats quite a lot of space at full resolution and highest quality so the SD card was just the way to go.
That was, until yesterday when suddenly I got the dreaded “SD card unexpectedly removed” error message. First time I got that error and all it was when I left my phone charging and apparently got a call. Checked the storage settings and the options for the external card was just grayed out.
So I did all the reboot, eject-reinsert card, take battery out routines to no avail. I used an external micro SD card adapter to use it on my laptop’s card reader, inserted it in other phones and USB dongles but all those couldn’t detect the card. I was really hoping that, at worst, there would just be some data corruption and that I’d still be able to recover some of my files but the mere fact that devices wouldn’t even detect the “presence” of the card meant it’s a goner.
I tried an old 4GB card into the phone and it works on the phone so I don’t really know which fried my card but this issue on Galaxy phones seems to be well documented regardless of brand or class of the micro SD card used.
It just sucks that my routine backup was scheduled yesterday afternoon, just hours before. I hindsight, I shouldn’t have skimped on mobile data consumption and synched my documents and photos to Dropbox so as to have automated backup redundancy.
Data loss is still a loss and I am in mourning.