Corrupted card
Also known as: card failure, unreadable card
A memory card whose file system has been damaged, so the camera or computer cannot read what is on it even though the data is often still there.
Updated
What it means
A corrupted card is usually a damaged index rather than damaged footage. The file system that says where each clip lives has been broken, and without it the card appears empty, unformatted or refuses to mount, which a damaged frame inside a working file never does.
The data underneath is frequently intact. That is why recovery works at all: tools scan for the signatures of video files directly and rebuild a list without trusting the structure that failed.
Causes are mundane. Removing a card while writing, a battery dying mid recording, or a counterfeit card doing what counterfeit cards do account between them for most cases, and a Card formatting habit prevents a surprising share of them.
How it works in practice
Stop using the card immediately. Every further write reduces what can be recovered, and a camera prompting to format is actively dangerous at this point rather than helpful.
Image the card to a file before running anything. Recovery then operates on the copy, so a tool that makes things worse has not touched the only remaining source. Imaging takes as long as a normal copy and removes the risk of a second attempt being impossible.
Recovered clips often lack an index and need rebuilding by Remuxing before a player will open them, as an unfinalised Camera crash file does, which is the same step an unfinalised recording needs before a player will open it.
What to watch out for
Agreeing to format when the camera asks is the irreversible error, and it is the most common one because the prompt appears at exactly the moment somebody wants the camera working again.
Counterfeit cards fail in a particular way, reporting a capacity they do not have and corrupting whatever was written beyond the real limit, which looks like random Corrupted frames rather than a card problem.
Recovered footage also arrives without its original names or timestamps, which makes reassembling a session by time impossible and leaves ordering to be inferred from the content.
How RawClip handles it
Files that cannot be read are reported rather than skipped quietly, and clips without usable timestamps are ordered by content rather than assumed to be in sequence. A partially recovered card still produces a highlight from what survived.