To ask you if you can rescue my SD card which contains DS' first steps video

[OneSliceIsNeverEnough]

I have a video camera, circa 2013. It's a Panasonic. I have to be honest, I've never really figured out how to extract the videos off the SD cards and onto something like a DVD.

I don't use the camcorder that often but have done more often since DS was born, notably to capture his first steps.

Everything was going ok and all has been well with it for months and have enjoyed seeing playback on the little screen.

Have changed batteries several times over the months and so on, but then the other day I reloaded the battery and went to film and the screen said "Check SD card".

Husband put the card into the computer and an SD card reader and says the card is not being recognised.

Please can anyone help? Is there a way I can retrieve the video files?

Try it in some more computers. But odds are high that the card has just failed - they do that. I'm sorry.

There are commercial data recovery services, I suspect you'd be looking at a few hundred quid for them to take a run at it.

In future... you can just copy the movie/pics to a folder on your computer. Then you'd have two copies, one on the SDcard, one on the computer.

I always have at least three copies of everything I want to keep, in physically different places.

Yeah, I had a micro one that malfunctioned OP, Googled it and apparently it's common for them to just fail but it did start working again randomly when I put it into a dongle, so there may be hope. Like SpoonBlender says, be sure to try it in different devices. Computers are funny things, you might find a different device will pick it up.

I hope someone techie can help you out, it's horrible losing precious moments like that.

My DD had an SD card in her phone which died. It had a lot of photos on which were important. We tried several machines to access the card and failed.

We eventually contacted a company in Germany, who would basically take the card apart and access the data directly. It would cost £££ if they were successful and less if they weren't.

We duly sent the card off and they managed to extract the all the photos and data. It was very expensive. We back up a lot more now

Oh, we found a similar service in London, but they wanted a lot of money to even just look at the card, regardless of whether they managed to recover any data.

At least the German company only charged if they could recover something.

Fingers crossed you find a solution.

We looked into this when I lost some footage because our videocamera failed. You can pay to try and get it retrieved. It's quite a lot and not guaranteed but maybe worth a try?

Try to take comfort in the fact that you were there when it happened, it will always be in your memory and you probably wouldn't have watched that video much anyway. Perhaps write down your memories of the day in his baby book or whatever while you have it at the forefront of your mind.

Could it simply be 'locked'?
I've a Sandisk card that can sometimes be knocked when I change batteries in my camera. I need to unlock it and put it carefully back into the camera in a few times, to keep the lock off.
It's worth a try.
Image shows where the lock is.

Try software called Photorec. It will recover files from a disk where the filesystem - the 'index' of where all the files are - is corrupted.

Thank you all very much for your suggestions :-) you have given me hope!

If it's a SanDisk card their recovery software is excellent.