EOS 80D Unable to Access Full-Size Images

[Amanda12lv]

For starters I have the canon 80D 

I finished my second photoshoot (same sd card) I shut my camera off and the screen said “recording imagines… 1 of 1 images remaining. 

Then the images were gone..

I tried not to panic and restored them in the software I have. 

when I restored them my images are TINY and some are locked? 

I can’t find anyone else with this problem and I’ve NEVER seen this. 

Has anyone seen this? 

[shadowsports]

Greetings,

Yes, we have seen this type of behavior previously.  

Corrupt file system, bad formatting

Using micro SD cards in adapters, instead of full size cards

Fake or counterfeit cards

Low quality brands 

Battery goes dead before the camera has finished writing to the card

are all examples of what might cause data loss.  Sometimes you can use a reader, or recovery software to recover images or data.  Hard to say what happened here with certainty.  Were you shooting in RAW, .jpg or both?  What are the sizes of the files you recovered?  Are they full size, smaller (thumbnails)?  What software are you reading them in?  Can you see them with the card in the camera?  Are you using PC or MAC.

[Tronhard]

Rick is correct, and given your statement that " I shut my camera off and the screen said “recording imagines… 1 of 1 images remaining." 

A data card is far too slow to record data directly, so the camera uses high speed memory chips to store the data while it cues in the buffer as it feeds the data to the card at a speed the card can accept. I suspect it is likely that the camera, in shutting off, cut the power while the buffer was still writing to the card.  The buffer is what is called volatile memory,  that is it depends on a power source to keep it, so when the camera is turned off, that information is lost, but the data write to the card is incomplete. This is NOT good, and often results in the total loss of access to the whole card, certainly the data is corrupted and you will lose access to the files - normally, if the write process is incomplete, this is not recoverable.

A similar phenomenon happens if an external storage device is unplugged from a computer while data is being transferred to or from the card.  In Windows, for example, the correct way to disconnect an SD or USB device is to use the Eject feature in the Windows file manager.  It will warn you if the writing process has not been completed and advise you to wait. 

Writing files to devices assigns data to File Allocation Units, and the location each specific data element is stored in a File Allocation Table (FAT).  If this process is interrupted, the table is not completed or scrambled, resulting in the loss of the data on the card.

Moral of the story, never turn the camera off while the data is being written to card.