Talk about good luck - photography and memory cards

Amazing story from Ask The Photographer:

A photographer, the White House, and a smashed SD card: A data-salvaging saga
What do you do when an SD card containing shots of President George W. Bush and your client in the White House breaks into pieces, leaving you holding one of the tiny microchips you know full well should be inside?

The answer probably won�t surprise you one bit: Take a deep breath and try to remain calm. This will provide you with no practical benefit. It will, however, afford you just enough time to really mull over how completely screwed you might be.

This is precisely the situation photographer Justin Kase Conder found himself in last month.

After an epic effort to gain access to the White House and nab a camera that would actually be allowed inside, he was able to take hundreds of photos and a few hi-res video clips of his clients and G.W. at the White House, only to see the SD card that contained all the data snap to pieces in his hands like a cracker. A really small, really important, $30 cracker.

Justin actually was able to find someone who could read the bare chip and recover a bunch of the files. Here is what he had to work with: Don't know what the brand was and cannot recognize the packaging. I prefer to stick with the major players (SanDisk or Lexar) and have never had any problems in six years of shooting digital.