Mavic Air Did Not Save to SD Card

[RPSM]

Hi - I'm hoping someone has some idea what happened. We flew the other day with a good quality SD card. We switched to two other SD cards, once after each flight (learned some lessons through the years). On arrival back home, two of the cards downloaded just fine, but on the other card, we had a strange occurrence. The HDR folder had all the pictures we took in their three exposures. The 100Media folder on the other hand, was empty. None of the pictures nor videos were present. The phone had the low-quality copies of our flights and pictures, but nothing was recorded on the SD card. We checked the drone memory and it was empty. The other two cards were both correct. I ran the SD card through two data recovery programs, just to be sure there had been no "user error", and the results came back with only old deletions from previous flights.

Has anyone seen a situation where the Mavic Air appeared to record, but ultimately did not save to the card? The one strange thing is that the HDR folder was correct (so at least we saved the images), but no joint image no video was saved. We have the footage from the phone, so it's not a total loss, though it's in 720p and a bit choppy.

 

[Kola]

Did you change the deafult setting to save to SD?

A new, out of the box Air will save to internal memory by default.

 

[RPSM]

Yes that’s why the other two SD cards worked.

 

[Aussie Oldtimer]

Over the years, ive lost lots of pics as a result of removing and replacing SD and CF cards.
I lost a full practice session of MotoGP photos when the sd card failed.
I never take them out of my drone or my cameras and just download directly by cable and havent had an issue since. you can get massive storage amounts on cards these days

 

[Olav van Gerven]

I noticed this week, that to switch from foto to video I press the video button once, then to start recording, I press it a second time. And the other way around, to foto, press foto once, then make the pictures.
Could it be that "in the heat of the f(l)ight" you only pushed the video button once, changing the mode but not strting the recording?

 

[GadgetGuy]

I noticed this week, that to switch from foto to video I press the video button once, then to start recording, I press it a second time. And the other way around, to foto, press foto once, then make the pictures.
Could it be that "in the heat of the f(l)ight" you only pushed the video button once, changing the mode but not strting the recording?

Been there! Done that! Very frustrating! When switching back and forth between stills for spherical panoramas and video flying in between them, it's all too easy with all the button switching going on to think you still need to start recording video, when, in fact, you already had, and now you just shut it off! Lost the final 5 minutes of a flight video that way just three weeks ago! I'm more careful now!

 

[GadgetGuy]

Over the years, ive lost lots of pics as a result of removing and replacing SD and CF cards.
I lost a full practice session of MotoGP photos when the sd card failed.
I never take them out of my drone or my cameras and just download directly by cable and havent had an issue since. you can get massive storage amounts on cards these days

Personally, since any flight can potentially be the last, I never change batteries without also swapping microSD cards. Putting all your eggs in one basket is risking them all. The larger the card, the more flights you will lose if the drone is unrecoverable, or the card goes bad. Use reliable cards, and remove any from use that become the least bit unreliable. My biggest risk is forgetting to format the card before each flight. That is why I use 64GB cards. I can forget to reformat three times before I run out of recording room during a flight, which is the kiss of death! However, everything older on the card has already been safely copied off, and is an additional backup copy until I run out of cards and need to use it. When your only copy of your last several flights is flying around several miles away, that is far riskier than removing a reliable microSD card after each flight. YMMV.