We needed an SD card urgently and just bought a cheap one from a basic department store. I should know better, as I’ve worked professionally with SD card benchmarking and filesystems… but still thought “We just need a few photos, how bad can it be?”. Turns out - really bad.

The card got corrupted after first use, refused reformatting and repartitioning (only 2/32GB were useable). I managed to salvage the photos from this first photo session - total luck. Btw, not all repair tools are made equal. The macOS built-in fsck didn’t do the job, but the one from dosfstools did the trick.

Anyway - don’t buy the cheapest card you find from your department store, if you care about what you keep on it that is.