| Buyer be warned i think this is extremely brand-dependent. While i've had generally solid experience with sandisk for almost 20 years and had a few old drives (which i hear are slc-based so its not surprising) hold files for over 5 years no issue, i recently almost lost over 4 years of photos. I had purchased some lexar drives from costco since they were dual interface (usb A / usb C) about 2 years ago, and it was usefull to just get some pictures off my phone. I usually don't rely on such a setup for long term but as with all things I was delayed tending to it. I figured there were 2 per box so i just copied them twice, and diffed them several times to make sure they were exact copies. After 24 months, one of the drives had a %95 loss, almost every picture was lost cut-off bottom half or so. The other drive surprisingly seemed fine, though it had been plugged in every 6-9 months I recall, as I wanted to browse it a few times, it seems that this action saved the volume. Upon further inspection the good drive still lost 10 pictures in about 5 thousand, so it wasn't perfect. Lexar. https://www.ebay.com/itm/176810492981?chn=ps&_trkparms=ispr%... |
If these are JPEGs with a grey or green lower half, it's likely only a few 16x16 macroblocks are corrupted and you can recover the rest.
This cannot be done programmatically because you have to guess what the average colour of the block was, but it can be worth it for precious pictures.