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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Horoscope Fish" data-source="post: 327325" data-attributes="member: 13090">I'd just like to point out that formatting your SD card in your camera does not accomplish the same thing, nor is it the same thing as, formatting an SD card in your computer whether it be a MAC or PC. We're talking about two things here: 1) The Native File Format: It happens to be a format called FAT32. It stands for File Allocation Table. Others formats that are used in other applications are FAT16 and NTFS but SD cards, and your camera, use FAT32. It's a standard. You can't write anything to an SD card that has not been formatted because the formatting is what creates the underlying structure. Formatting is like taking a blank sheet of paper and turning it into graph paper. Each little box on our sheet of graph paper is now a container for data. Without those boxes our blank sheet of paper can't organize anything. Our SD cards are blank sheets of paper until they are formatted using FAT32. This step turns our blank SD card into a card that can hold data using a folder system. It doesn't HAVE a folder system yet though because different devices (cell phones for example) use different folder systems. This is why the device has to create it's own folder system. It will do so on the framework of FAT32 (the grid-lines on our sheet of paper). 2) The Folder System: The folder system is written to the card only after the card has been formatted (turned into a sheet of graph paper). The folder system uses, organizes and keeps track of which boxes on our graph paper already hold data, what data they hold and what boxes can hold new data. Fortunately SD cards come from the factory already formatted in FAT32 for us so most of us have never had to deal with formatting. The crucial difference is this: When you "format" the card in-camera what you're really doing is re-creating the file-system, or emptying out all the boxes on our grid paper. The grid-lines themselves remain untouched and unchanged. If you want to actually reformat the SD card, if you want to erase all the grid-lines and start with a truly fresh sheet of paper, you HAVE to reformat the SD card in your computer using the FORMAT command (no, not "Quick Format", that's not the same thing). Formatting your SD card in your computer is the ONLY way to truly erase the card and start from scratch. What your camera calls "formatting" is actually overwriting the existing folder structure. Which is fine, but it's a totally different operation than reformatting the card. The folder-system I reformat pretty much before every new shooting session. I re-format my SD cards maybe two or three times a year.....</blockquote>

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