Lost Photos on M2P SD Card - Have Smart Controller - Best practices/settings to make sure never happens again.

[gette]

Hi All!

I am a 99.9% Mac guy (so that might have something to do with all this - lol).

Anyway I went and did a paid shoot (stills) popped out SD card, put in reader on my Mac Pro and wouldn't mount. Did a few time and finally did and nothing.
Checked Internal, and SC nothing. Used software to check SD card and recovered some, but no photo files.
Put back into drone and connected to controller and required a firmware update, did that and it seemed to reformat the SD card so def didn't get anything after that with the recovery software.

It was a new SD card (and I did not format initially in the drone) which may or may not be the issue. I am having Amazon swap it out for me JIC.

So they photos are 100% gone and moving on....

Going forward I'd like some advice on best practices and settings to double check (the SC confused me initially about the Internal / External SD popups, etc. And everywher eon the Controller when it refereds to storage and not 100% sure if it is only referring to the SC internal and SD card and/or the M2P internal and SD Card.

1 - Going forward I am going to reformat each SD Card in drone prior. Is the best/easiest place to do this is in DJI Go 4 under the Camera settings?
I'm thinking all the other locations on the SC might be referring to the SC Internal and SD Storage.

2 - So I guess I need to figure out all the software locations that refer to Storage and which are referring to SC via M2P.

3 - What are the settings in these various locations should double check to make sure everything is setup for maximum reliability (redundancy would be nice!)

4 - What/how can I double check to make sure my photos (and video) that I am currently taking are being written to the SD Card in flight.
The little ">" Play button on the lower right?

5 - Is there a way to save the high resolution photos/videos or backup what is on the M2P Internal or SD to the SC storage?

6 - I wonder if using the M2P internal storage is more reliable and then somehow quickly/easily downloading it or back it up in between filights/batteries?

Worst case I am going to swap SD cards per flight/battery JIC. But I typically do different angles/locations so that really wont help 100%. So I kinda need the most reliable way per flight possible.

As I mentioned I am all Mac so I have read about possible corruption when putting SD card into a reader on the mac. Wonder what else I can use (maybe purchase an android based tablet to use for backing up/storing and possible bonus of a client in flight viewer?)

Anyway sorry for all the questions, as it seems there are a few related issue to this.

Thank you all for taking a look at this!
Geo

 

[ninja_geezer]

i had some files recovered from a similar issue the other week ,try and get wondershare recoverit ive used it twice worked perfect.

 

[gette]

Thanks for the reply.

I have a few different disk recovery software. Some of which are pretty expensive. There is nothing there (well not photos anyway). I don't think there ever was, which may have been the problem. Bad SD card from Amazon. Actually realized it says 64gb and only showing as 32gb. Maybe counterfeit, even though I orderd 4 of them at the same time, direct from Amaozn as seller for that reason. To prevent chance of getting one from a 3rd party.

SanDisk Extreme 64gb

Anyway, regardless as I said I moved on from files. My questions are not in regards to trying to recover anything.

 

[TampaTC]

Format the SD card in the Drone before a paid shoot. Only use footage from the drone not the Smart Controller. If your getting paid for a shoot include the cost of a NEW SD card and after you finish flying pop that out and into a source to view the contents captured. If you need to redo it, you are there.

SD cards don't last for ever. They can crack, break, become corrupt, or just stop working. I buy 5 to 10 128gb at a time. I know to add into my cost for supplies, I will store the cards for the shoots for further reference or have sold them to the client as raw image/data but also have a different release form for that work.

 

[Dave Maine]

You are on the right track.

Use properly rated sd cards - they should be rated for read and write for at least 100 mb/sec

Format card in drone

stop recording pictures/video before turning drone off.

only use images and video from card itself, not any others, as they are all low resolution proxies.

 

[gette]

Thanks for the replies.

It was a brand new, never used SD Card. Which I think was the main reason there was an issue.

I didn't even have any low res versions of this shoot on the SC.

 

[ff22]

Thanks for the replies.

It was a brand new, never used SD Card. Which I think was the main reason there was an issue.

I didn't even have any low res versions of this shoot on the SC.

While flying you can transfer/download both pictures and videos to your device whether it be a phone/tablet or smart controller. Warning - photos transfer rather fast whereas videos can take minutes and both actions use drone battery power. So use caution if you do it while flying. You can also do it once you land with the drone still on. The image might vary a bit between your controlling device.

See the attached:

 

[son_of_catfish]

I have had similar issues trying to find content between the drone SD card, smart controller internal storage/sd card and now the DJI Goggles. In general, the drone SD card has been the most reliable location. However, I would like to be able to preview content from the smart controller without having to transfer the SD card from drone to controller. I know this is meant to work, but I have found it unreliable. I have enabled the appropriate settings to cache content, but 9 times out of 10 I still can't find stuff on the smart controller.

@ninja_geezer, thanks for the screenshots, I'll have a look the next time I try a shoot.