You and your son have been loving the trips to the park with the Spark and his bicycle. The training wheels have been on for weeks, and today is the day that little Jimmy makes the monumental transition to two wheels. As he is mounting that bright red Trek, you get ActiveTrack ready on your Spark, which will allow you to get the whole event on video while freeing up a hand if wobbly wheels prevail. Just as you hit the record button as Jimmy’s feet find purchase on welcoming pedals, an “SD card full” message pops up. You just transferred the old footage to your computer last night and deleted it from the SD card! What gives?
There are several occasions when formatting your drone's SD card is necessary. One such occasion is when you delete SD card files using your computer, but a glitch occurs where the files are hidden from view when you “delete” them, but they aren’t actually deleted. This was depicted in the story above and would call for an SD card format. To format the SD card, open the DJI Go 4 app and go to the camera settings. Click the rightmost tab and scroll to the bottom where you’ll see “Format SD Card”. Tap that and you’ll be good to go, with everything being erased from the SD card.
What does formatting an SD card mean?
If you haven’t spent much time in the world of technology, a term like “formatting” may sound all kinds of foreign to you. Put simply, formatting an SD card for your drone is the process of setting up a file management system so your camera will know where to place videos and images. This is exemplified in the creation of the DCIM (Digital Camera IMages) folder you see when you insert your drones SD card into the computer.
Will formatting an SD card delete its contents?
Yes, and no. Formatting your drones SD card will erase the file management system that was previously set-up.What does that mean for you? If you format the SD card using the DJI GO 4 app, remove the SD card from the drone and place it into the computer, you will not see any files on that card. The actual images and videos are still present (or at least parts of them if they’ve been written over by new data) somewhere on the card. Formatting the SD card gives the camera permission to rewrite over the deleted data. If you’re wondering how much space is available to use on the SD card after formatting it, the answer is all of it.
I watched a YouTube video that gives a good illustration of this. If you open a textbook to the table of contents and cover one of the chapter titles with a sticky note that says “empty” on it, the corresponding chapter doesn’t magically disappear. Just as you can’t see the chapter title in a book's table of contents, you can’t see any of the videos or images in the directory but they are technically still there. Here’s the video:
If you want to ensure that the contents of a memory card are permanently deleted, you have two options: rewrite over the data multiple times until not even a trace of the old content exists, or you can physically destroy the card.
Show me the MENU item. I've spent two days looking in between updates. Why not put this information is the Users Guide? Search Format in the users guide, NOTHING! Back to Youtube and searching for someone that can capture a screen shot of the MENU ITEM!
Airheadbit Posted at 4-20 21:25
Show me the MENU item. I've spent two days looking in between updates. Why not put this information is the Users Guide? Search Format in the users guide, NOTHING! Back to Youtube and searching for someone that can capture a screen shot of the MENU ITEM!
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