Formatting

[sillyputty]

I onw a cannon powershot s2is. My two small 16MB memory cards work but I am constantly having problems with my 256MB memory card. It's constantly deleting my pictures and then coming up as memory card error. I got it to work again by formatting it. I was wondering if someone could explain what exaclty formatting does? I was under the immpression I only had to format it once. Am I doing something wrong as I am quite new to didgital cameras? Thank you....

[RTaylor]

After you offload your pictures and have them backed up, always format your card.
Deleting the pictures isnt really getting rid of the pictures completely, they are still there in a way, I think its just the header to the file that is stripped allowing you to not see it.

In the short term, deleting some files while they are in the camera is ok if you know its a bad shot, or maybe to get more room to shoot just a couple more.

But always format after offloading the pictures.

Its like a hard drive, if you constantly delete files from your computer, create new ones over time with never running a system defrag, then you will have errors eventually on your hard drive. But with a hard drive you dont want to format, because you lose everything so thats why defrag works on your hard dirve, but its better to format a card,


Quite possibly if you have just been deleting pictures from your card and never formatting it each time, then that could be why you eventually started to have errors.

If you still have errors after formating, then its time to buy a new card

Hope this is helpful