Can heat cause images on a camera media card to be deleted?

Question

I was recently in a really hot climate and my pentax digital camera started freezing up on me. I would have to remove the batteries to make it start up again, but it would just freeze up again. If I left the batteries in, the camera got very hot around the battery compartment. I had one media card filled up (256 mb) and when I got home, only 29 of the pictures showed up...and those pictures were on the 3rd day of the vacation. Everything before that is gone. I have tried a number of the programs available on line to recover lost images, but all of them said that there was no recoverable images on the card. However, the 29 good images are still on there. So I don't know if I should continue trying to get my other pictures. Is it possible that the heat from the batteries deleted images somehow?

Answer 1

Heat shouldnt make pictures delete by magic. Either the memory card is defective or your camera is defective. Heat isnt that extreme in deleting pictures. Take some pictures inside a cool house or an A/C building and see if it does the same thing. If it does then go back to where you bought it and tell them they sold you a defective memory card. If the new memory card doesnt work either then your camera is defective.

Answer 2

I live in a hot climate and own a couple of DSLR cameras. Heat can be an issue, but your problem sounds a little extreme. Most certainly with my advanced Point and Shoot Fuji cameras, I notice a lot of heat if I shoot video, but this has so far not resulted in the camera freezing. If I shoot rapidly with my SLRs the cards get hot, but again have never frozen up, although I have decided to take a break for a while to allow them to cool.

My best guess is that you have a faulty memory card which is only showing the fault under high temperatures. My boss at work had similar problems. He was having a few small issues, but when I took the card and stress tested it, the card died and he had to replace it. I am guessing you have a card with a similar fault

Answer 3

If you read into the specs on cards like SanDisk's Extreme III line, then heat can definitely cause issues with flash memory cards (certainly if you get them hot enough they could melt or ignite, but...). It's also possible that, since the heat was clearly affecting your camera, it could have resulted in the card being accidentally flashed, which would explain why only the last batch of images stuck around.

As for recovering them...well, that's the downside to the way flash memory works. Hard-drives "erase" data by just rewriting the File Allocation Table to ignore the unwanted data until such time as it can be overwritten by new data. Flash memory will actually reset a full block of data at a time to erase the entire file. If the data was deleted, it was literally erased, which means there's nothing left for Norton Disk Doctor or any equivalent program to search through for your missing data.