We’ve all heard the horror stories, and some of us unfortunate few have had it happen to us. That dreaded moment in the middle of a shoot or when you get home only to discover that the memory card has been corrupted and you’ve lost some if not all of your files from the shoot! Disaster, panic, grief, and many more colorful words will go through our mouths at that moment. No matter how much you prepare and plan, there’s always a chance it can just go bad. There’s always data recovery which is costly and time consuming, but there’s something new out there that may help ease a lot of our worries.

Enter ProGrade Digital and their new Refresh Pro Software & memory cards. The program monitors the health of select ProGrade Digital Memory cards and can“refresh your card’s performance to factory new condition.”

The software is currently available for Windows with a MacOS version coming soon, and will work with any ProGrade memory card and reader that has the “R” Logo.

That’s the catch though, for this to work you need to run all 3 in tangent. A compatible memory card, card reader, AND the Refresh Software. Granted, it’s a pretty small price to pay for that peace of mind. Basically it’ll read a Green, Yellow, Or Red based on the health of your memory card. (I bet you can’t guess which stands for which?).

“Refresh Pro checks key attributes of the memory card’s use history to determine how much life is remaining. If the card has less than 10% remaining life it should be replaced soon and not used for an important shoot. Refresh Pro also cleans the way data is stored to the memory card to ensure it is optimized for the highest performance.”

I don’t know about you, but this all sounds pretty incredible to me! Granted we’ve not tested this out first hand but I’ve already reached out to the company to inquire about a review so we’ll let you know when that happens. Regardless, if it works as described, this will take a LOT of stress away from my fellow photographer and videographers out there!

You can pick up the Refresh Pro Software for Windows 10 from ProGrade for $29.99 US with a MacOS version coming soon. (Trust me, i’ve asked about that also!) The “Refresh” SD Memory Cards are currently available from ProGrade directly, but with any luck they’ll be available on B&H, Amazon, and others in a few weeks. (yes, i’ve asked about this too). You can get the rest of the Refresh line cards and readers through Amazon, B&H and other retailers already.

Additionally if you’re already in that catastrophic situation with corrupted or deleted files, you can run ProGrade’s Recovery Pro software, (Available on Mac & PC for $49.99US), and recover nearly any file type that you may encounter from common JPEG and RAW files all the way through a range of video files such as .MP4, .MOV and AVCHD

What do you think? does it sound too good to be true? Or is this an “about time” situation for memory cards and their manufacturers? Let us know what you think in the comments below.