Any and all solid state memory is volatile. To believe they are not is pure naivety. Your thumb drive is volatile. The memory card in your camera... yup, volatile. The NAND memory in the iPhone, yup, volatile. None of it should be considered incorruptible or viable for permanency. Unless there's a moving disc with some form of a writer, it's going to be volatile.

 

I appreciate the reminder. I back up my computer every week. I am CONSTANTLY reminding people to back up their computer files but I had not backed up my phone since I got it. I have now copied the contents over to a folder on my computer. Hopefully I never have to make use of it but at least it is there.

 

Is backing up data a good idea? Of course it is. I am a backup nazi! But I have yet to have a thumbdrive, sdcard, compact flash card fail on me in over a decade. Maybe it's a Murphy's law thing. I am also very picky about how I eject or unmount my removeable memory/device.

 

There are several threads in the Droid support and troubleshooting forum about all media files being erased from people's SD cards. It's happened to a lot of us and appears, right now, to maybe be related to the Slacker radio widget.

 

Volatile means that the memory blanks when power is removed. SDCards are not volatile.

 

I think it happens when something goes wrong with Slacker because the three times it has happened to me, I think I can trace back to when I started Slacker and had to enter my username and password again even though I had just been using Slacker and hadn't closed out of it, or anything.

I called Motorola support and I'm going to contact Slacker support today. I uninstalled Slacker after the third time my stuff all got erased and I haven't had anything erased since.

 

I think you're not familiar with the word 'volatile'. None of those are volatile. Volatile means it disappears when it's powered down. RAM is volatile. Hard drives and SSDs are not volatile, regardless of how fragile they are.

 

I beat you.

 

Ya, it seems to have something to do with slacker. Dont use it for sure until the devs can resolve it.

 

Hum... not to be picky, but an SD-card or thumbdrive is not likely to change suddenly and unexpectedly.

An SD-card or thumbdrive can have a sudden and unexpected change, but it is very unlikely due to the MTBFs that have been published.

Be that it may, thanks for the post/thread so I can remember to backup my sd-card in the Driod

 

for the idiot droid users like me...... how do you back up ??

 

I created a folder on my computer called "phone backup". I connected the phone to the computer, copied all the files on the sd card and pasted them into my phone backup folder.

 

If you're going to connect your DROID to your PC, here's what to do:

1. Connect USB cable to DROID and PC
2. Your DROID should say "Droid", or whatever you have as the SD card notification sound.
3. Pull down the Notification bar on your DROID and tap "USB connected"
4. Tap on "Mount"
5. Go in "My Computer" on your PC, and look for a new Removable Disk.
6. Copy all of those files. That is the SD card on your DROID.
7. When you are done, pull down the Notification bar on your DROID again.
8. Tap "Turn off USB storage"
9. Tap "Turn Off"
10. Unplug USB cable. Done. Now you can sleep well.

Another method would be to just buy a micro sdcard reader. Remove the micro sdcard from your DROID and put it in the reader and go from there.

HTH

 

Same thing happened to me. I'm pissed! I do have a backup at work, but it still annoys me. I too, had the slacker app installed on my phone. Looks like it's time to switch to Pandora...

 

A small thing that can anoy,

I used a micro-SD-ram adapter to copy my card to my laptop just now. I noticed this the last two times I used a removed card from the Driod to do copies.

When powered back on, the Driod no longer used the wallpaper that was stored on the SD-Card. I had to go back to gallery and select set to wall paper.

The thing that causes the Anoy is its hard to get exactly the same crop on the photo each time you do this so your wall paper is never exactly the same again.

 

If you use slacker and its widget you are going to get your card erased. I can confirm it is the problem. Had my droid since launch day and never had a problem with the card losing data. Even pulled it from the computer before unmounting it. Never a problem until this past Friday when I installed slacker. I love slacker, much more than Pandora actually, but Saturday morning I found out my card was erased. I was pretty upset, but fortunately got most of the data, pics, back. Then again today the card was erased after using slacker some.

 

Is there a nice "how to" file on performing a proper backup for this phone? Thanks in advance.

 

this sucks...photos, MP3s, videos...gone.

All the MP3s were from my library, so I have those, and any of the good photos/videos, I had already off loaded. So not a total loss.

Do folks think it's the slacker widget (versus simply having slacker installed) that is at fault?

 

My wife has had this happen three times on her Eris. I just deleted her widget, so hopefully that will be sufficient to prevent this from happening again. If not, then bye-bye slacker, hello Pandora.

 

Not to be "picky" but that statement is just wrong. Solid state devices such as sd cards are significantly more stable than mechanical hard drives by a large margin. Anything which is mechanical is more unstable because it has moving parts - not the other way around.

-Mark