Nobody said card failures do not happen.
No they behave as if failures do not happen, an important distinction, whilst saying how they've never had an incident and implying failures are not a problem. I had gear stolen from a shared city centre house once because a mother of one of my flatmates didn't bother to close and lock the back door. The reason being was that she'd never been robbed in all the time she lived in a small village in the country, so naively didn't feel the need to lock up. Losing irreplaceable video tape footage of my sister's wedding in the process.
Bart simply offered anecdotal counter-argument to the few of you, representing the vocal minority, who created the impression that card failures happen with catastrophic frequencies.
No with catastrophic results, not catastrophic frequency. Once again a very important distinction. It happens rarely, which is still way too often in my books. If a film brand failed as frequently as computer stuff did, the company would have rapidly gone out of business, but people seem endure computer issues and treat them as being more acceptable.
The real questions is: what is the failure rate of memory cards, statistically? I bet it is much, much smaller than a plethora of other events that might ruin your shoot.
Is it less likely than all the other possibilities together? Yes, but that's not comparing things equally and as it an easily preventable problem, why not simply avoid the issue. Just because you fail to see the benefit, you think there isn't one for others. Just like with in camera GPS that you thought was pointless even though others find it useful. As it happens I recently heard a stock photographer talking about how it helped his sales recently. Why do people think that what works for them is suitable for everyone else, when that is so demonstrably not the case.
Hoodman claim it's around 2-3% for consumer cards like Sandisk which is what most 'pro' cards are in fact, if you want
non-consumer cards look here. Which why most people on here are quite unlikely to have had a problem. Hard drives failures can
can be a lot higher. Obviously the only people who can really vouch for cards longevity are the manufacturers, who won't admit to anything. No-one uses cards in the large numbers as they do HDs so reliability or lack thereof is not visible in the same way. But interestingly Sandisk never counterclaimed/sued Hoodman for disparaging their products which I thought was interesting.
Why have I had several then? Probably the same reason I've had quite a few hard drive failures, I have had lots of them which obviously increase one's chances. Plus the reality is that whilst some people won't have any issues, some will have numerous by the nature of random distribution. Clusters happen and the more cards/drives you have the more likely it is to find a bad one. I had three of the infamous IBM deskstar drives that destroyed their business for example, one failed before I could get info off it, so had to be data recovered.