What’s the difference between a Tenon Saw and an SD Memory Card?

Both have a very specific purpose – a tenon saw is designed to cut wood and a Secure Digital Flash Memory Card is designed to store images and data. Well, that is what it is supposed to do…

However, it was going to happen sooner or later and just at the worst possible time…  Knowing that I was going to be taking hundreds of images to document the project’s stages for the articles I am writing, I bought a 64GB SD card for my camera .Yesterday I went to transfer the most recent images to my computer, turned on the camera and got this:

When I am not making Sawdust and Woodchips I can be found ‘administering’ to computers and networks (check out my infinisol site), often having to recover tens of thousands of files and have several programs in my recovery tool box that can recover data from corrupted media.  So this was going to be pretty easy…

Ha!

Anyway to cut a long story short – after leaving the software to run (a process that can take several hours) I was greeted this morning with a message “No Files Found! – do you want to initialize the drive ?” Y/N.

“Well that’s a bit of a bugger !”to put it mildly.

So what’s the difference between a Tenon Saw and an SD card?

My saw has never failed to work, has no moving parts, batteries have never run out and it’s performance is about as predictable as it gets. An SD card on the other hand can be capricious and that’s probably why they are call them Flash Cards – Images are gone in a flash.  so, it’s back to the woodshop with a new card in the camera and greater appreciation for my hand woodworking tools.