Memory Card Management

If you're using a portable digital recorder, your audio recordings are stored on memory chips in your voice recorder. Some chips are internal to the recorder, while others are removable. Let's take a few minutes to cover proper maintenance and care of your digital dictation memory.

Just like any digital media, recorder memory can, over time, become corrupted. If you regularly maintain your computer, you're familiar with disk utilities that repair damaged disks. These utilities repair disk drives by isolating corrupted memory blocks from being used in the future. In fact, over time, your hard drive may slowly lose capacity as more and more blocks are "taken off-line." Eventually, we all come to the point where we format our hard drives, wiping all the blocks "clean" and starting over. If you decide to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7, we understand you will have to re-format your hard drive.

With digital memory cards, such as those in our recorders, the memory "blocks" can become corrupted, through no fault of yours, the recorder or the memory chip. Static electricity, power glitches, USB glitches and more can cause one or more of the little 1's and 0's that make up digital data to become missing or inverted. Any missing data can cause your voice files to become unreadable; enough can render a memory card unusable.

In some cases, the corruption can be more than a simple data omission. Cards, which are susceptible to electromagnetic forces, heat, etc., can be so altered that they cannot be reliably used at all. As your memory cards age, this becomes a greater possibility.

How to Care for Internal Memory Cards

Internal memory in a recorder cannot be replaced. However, you can avoid trouble by regularly re-formatted the memory card. Every few months or so – or if you experience a memory error – download or retrieve any remaining and recoverable voice files from the recorder memory. If you know you have recordings on the memory which cannot download using normal means, use a file recovery tool, such as PC Inspector Smart Recovery. No guarantees it will always work, but sometimes it will recover lost files on memory cards.

Consult your Owner's Manual for instructions on how to re-format your internal memory on your recorder. It only takes a few seconds. Re-formatting will "re-set" your memory blocks. Note that re-formatting will erase any voice files still remaining on the recorder.

Caring for Removable Memory

If your handheld digital recorder uses removable memory cards, here's some basic care suggestions:

• Don't use memory cards as you would cassette tapes. Removable memory cards are small and can be easily lost or dropped behind desks and cabinets. Removing them also subjects them more easily to static electricity. Use the download feature of your software to retrieve voice files. If you need to send the files to a transcriptionist, consider using a professional software solution that can send the files over the Internet rather than passing on the memory card.
• Re-format regularly. Every few months or so, make it a habit to re-format your removable memory card. As discussed above, re-formatting resets the memory card's blocks and keeps corrupted blocks from causing problems.
• Replace every one to two years. Even with re-formatting, memory cards can become unrepairably corrupted. Consider keeping an extra memory card at hand, just in case. Put on your calendar to order replacements at least every 2 years.

While digital dictation is much more reliable and of higher quality than cassette tapes, memory cards used to record audio files are not infallible. With care and regular maintenance, you shouldn't have any problems using digital dictation to increase your efficiency.