What size cards do you use and what brand?

[Bossy]

...
Exactly. So if you have 1 and 1 and 1 and 1 and 1 and 1 card, regardless of size, there is no reason 1 wouldn't break just because you keep the other 1 and 1 and 1 and 1 and 1 at home. You can't just group what you don't use or don't even own in a group seperate from the one that you do use and use it as a percentage and reason why your 1 has less a chance of busting.

 

[MLeeK]

Your logic is warped and if you believe it, then that's fine for you I guess.
Each card-no matter how many you have-has the same chance of going ka-put. The chances are simply better that EVERY card won't go Ka-Put at the same time.
If you are putting everything in ONE card I hope to hell it's Hoodman.

 

[brush]

I once bought a 32 gig no name card for super cheap from microcenter because it seemed like a great deal & would be so nice to not have to switch out cards during a shoot. First gig, thankfully a favor for a friend & not something paid, I got 3 hours into a 4 burlesque show and the thing fried. I was taking video, shooting in burst mode, working that bad boy out! It couldn't handle all the data, or it was defective, who knows, but it died. I've learned my lesson & carry a bunch of Sandisk 4gig class 10's. No more off brands & no more storing all my eggs in 1 basket.

Now all this talk about odds of 1 card failing vs 1 of 100 failing & blah blah blah...if you set 1 no name 32 gig class 10 card in column A and 99 4 gig class 10 sandisks in column B and ask me to bet on which column I trust...I'm putting my money on the sandisks. If I need class 10 speed, I'm not going to trust a 32 gig card not to choke on all that data I'm throwing at it, and I'm sure as hell not trusting it to the lowest bidder generic ever again. That was a mistake.

And while we're on the odds thing, I'm not going to be betting $100 that something in the sandisk stack doesn't go bad, I'm betting $1 that each thing in the sandisk stack doesn't go bad. If you give me 2 to 1 odds, and I bet a hundred bucks that the single card isn't bad, I might win 200 bucks or I might have to walk away with nothing. Or if I split my bet up on all the cards in the other stack, I might win 2 bucks 99 times for 198 bucks, or I might only win 2 bucks 98 times and walk away with 196 bucks. Something you seem to be forgetting about statistics, if the odds of 1 card failing are 1/100, then when you have 2 cards your odds are 2/200...aka, exactly the same.

Any way you slice it, experience has taught me to steer clear of big cards.

 

[table1349]

Two schools of thought.
1 big card less chance of failure but if one fails you have a problem. Usually photos can be recovered for the most part using recovery software.
Lots of little cards, more chance of one failing but you don't lose everything. Bigger risk of misplacing or losing a card than one failing.

I use one big 16g card. I have taken in the neighborhood of 500,000 digital photos in the last 10 years and never had a card fail....major knock on wood.
I used to subscribe to the lots of 4g cards theory but then I lost one, and then I lost another one. Since I went to using big cards, no problems.

Make sure you format the card in camera prior to every shoot, never move cards from one camera to another without reformatting.
Don't delete and add delete and add on a card.

Be careful loading and unloading the cards so you don't bend the pins.

I almost always delete photos in camera off the card after a shoot, this causes no problem.

Buy the best cards you can afford.

Excellent recipe for epic failure you have here. But then others have already explained that to you. I am going to make a guess that you never took a Statistics class.

You make a very dangerous assumption. First you assume that the photos can be recovered from a failed card. Not always true and not always economical to pay to try and have them recovered.

Making a recommendation of one big card based on your inability to keep track of cards is also suspect. In the film days I carried more than one roll of film, and now more than one card. You see those old farm wives while they may not have had a whole lot of book learning, were pretty smart. Ever hear the saying, "Never put all your eggs in one basket." Farm life may be boring in the evening, but sitting around the fire making up sayings just isn't something they do for fun. Comes from practical experience.

I have been shooting for nigh on to 40 years now. Never lost a card in my life. Never lost a roll of film either. They aren't that hard to keep track of. A whole bunch of 4 gig cards, 10 to be exact, a Think Tank Pixel Pocket Rocket and every card labeled and I can shoot all day, never loose a card and know exactly what card or cards will have what portion of what I shoot. Hell I change cards at halftime at a game whether I need to or not. Same thing for any other kind of event I shoot. First time you loose an entire lifetime of memories for someone instead of just a portion, you will understand the concept of "Never put all your eggs in one basket."



To the OP. My choice of cards are Sandisk Extreme IV, 4 gig CF cards. Never had an issue with one. I prefer the IV's for download speed.

 

[printsnpaints]

It's good to have several smaller capacity cards so that you don't stake everything on one card. The size of the memory you will need depends on the resolution and the number of pictures that you will take. You can probably take more than a thousand low resolution images but only several hundred high quality ones.