This isnt so much a product review as it is a review of a companies customer service. First my story:

On Christmas Eve I was taking a couple photos with my Canon Xti when suddenly the camera gave the error “There is a problem with the CF Card. Replace the CF Card”.

That’s not good.

I tried turning the camera off, then back on, nothing. I then plugged the Compact Flash card into a card reader and tried to read it with my computer, nothing – Vista gave me an error saying that the card needed to be reformatted, I tried again, and it just read the card has being empty.

I played around a bit and somehow the card started working again (honestly, not sure what I did). I was able to take the photos off the card successfully. I then formatted the card, and it appeared to work well…

Christmas morning I took a bunch of photos when suddenly I got that same “replace the CF card” error. Only this time there was no recovering the photos. I downloaded a bunch of different recovery programs, and NONE of them would recognize the card. It was bad, and this “crash” had taken with it the 100 or so photos of my 2 year old daughter opening her presents and seeing her new bike for the first time. WHY did I use that same card?! I had an old 1gb card I could have used…

A few days later I called Lexar Support (the card I was using was a 300x 4gb UDMA Compact Flash card). I told them my story, and they emailed me a link to their recovery software, and he told me what to do with it to recover my photos and how to then erase, reformat, and test the card after I got my photos safely off.

My first reaction was, great more software to try. I had very low expectations. BUT, it worked!! The software was easy, and I was able to recover ALL the Christmas pictures I had taken, along with about 800 other photos that had been deleted, but still technically existed on the card.

After erasing/formatting & testing the card, it came up clean as if nothing was ever wrong. I called customer support back today and the rep assured me that he was confident that I will not have any more problems, but if I did, they would swap the card out. They say that a corrupt file is most likely what caused it, and the fact that I was able to get the photos back with their software supports that the card is physically okay.

I hope he’s right – I trust that he probably is – but one thing that is for sure, is the customer service team at Lexar is great, and because of them I got my photos back. I will definitely continue to use Lexar for any future CF cards that I may need!