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So, my four months old micro SD card from Samsung is faulty. After a few days of FS faults, it turned to read only for good. I tried many ways to write on it, and I couldn't, the only reason of this is that the card is faulty and needs to be replaced.

As the warranty is still valid, I contacted the vendor and they are willing to replace my card if I send them back the defective one. The thing is I have personal data on this card, including photos, invoices or bank records, etc. They are still accessible, without any effort, in a read only mode. I don't want to give them my data. At the very most, I would let them check the card in front of me, but that's all.

Is there someone here that had this kind of trouble and found a good method to deal with the vendor? Or is there no hope to get my money back (or a new card)?

PS: I'm not sure it's the good StackExchange site, but I didn't find a more appropriate one.

Christophe Drevet
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    Contact the manufacturer, rather than the vendor. They may have a tool with can provide a failure report without including important data. – Tetsujin Dec 13 '17 at 20:56
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    That's a great reason to always use encryption on flash memory devices, then you wouldn't care what happens to it. It's interesting to know that even if you could still write to it, it could quietly swap the "overwritten" sectors out with spares, keeping the data technically still readable (with specialized techniques) – Xen2050 Dec 13 '17 at 21:41
  • You're absolutely right @Xen2050. Yes, I know data can be retrieved from damaged storage devices, especially with flash memory, but it's a different deal than having them popup on your computer when you plug the device. – Christophe Drevet Dec 14 '17 at 08:18

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It looks like your choice now is whether to "sell" your data for the price of the sd card. I'll bet the company's policy is to not read customers data, but you can't be sure.

If you're concerned about passwords and access to your accounts, credit card & account numbers, you could change / get new ones...

Or you could try to "finish off" the card, since it's already broken anyway. But if you make it visibly damaged that might affect their warranty exchange/refund... If it were a magnetic hard drive you could still use a degausser or strong magnets, but there's not much that damages SD cards that's not easily visible. They're very resistant to vibrations & impact, I think magnetic fields & cold don't bother them. Maybe low heat from a hair dryer/heat gun that doesn't melt the plastic? Or 1 second intervals in a microwave oven until it stops reading?

Xen2050
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