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Originally Posted by ollieholmes
Thats what i was thinking, i will end up reformatting my cards after copying the photos over as it is alot faster than going thorugh and deleating each one. But surely it damages the card in the long run.
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Reformatting the card will not do it any harm whatsoever as it is a completely solid state device with no moving parts. If you delete individual files off the card then the file allocation table (hence FAT) gets very complicated as "holes" are left in the table. Reformatting the card gives a clean start and the devices that read and write to the card don't have to work around the gaps. This makes life easier for the devices (camera/PC/external storage device) to work with the card as they are not reading fragmented files.
I am in the habit of reformatting the card every time after I have transferred the files onto my PC. I also favour reformatting the card in the camera rather than on the PC. I consider it is more reliable to format the card using the device that has to write to it, less risk of subtle differences in the formatting causing errors and corruption.
Duncan.