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372 The “Setup” (Toolbox Icon) Menu Settings

too, until you start taking more pictures, at which time your old images will
be irrecoverably overwritten. Formatting a card erases all the information,
blocks out bad sectors, and sets things up again so new images can be
accommodated without the bad parts causing corruption.
Now that you sort of get the idea behind formatting, let me add a little more
important detail. There are actually two kinds of formatting that are
possible; the first one being a thorough format and is the kind of formatting
I described above: A complete teardown and rebuild of the library shelves,
tossing all books in the process. There is another kind of formatting,
known as a “Quick Format” which is very, very similar to the process of
deleting all the images on the card. (In fact, as far as this discussion goes,
they’re as good as identical.) This kind of formatting takes significantly
less time, and in fact this is the kind of formatting your camera does. Got it
so far?

So, to reiterate: When you delete an image from your memory card, the
image doesn’t actually get deleted (for that would take too much time);
rather, a pointer to it just gets deleted from the memory card’s card catalog.
(This is usually true when you delete files from computer hard drives too.)
Unintuitively, when you format a memory card using the camera, the same
thing is true: The card catalog is erased, but the previous image data still
remains!
You may recall reading in the camera manual that you should always
format the memory card in the camera, and not the computer. Given that
in-camera formatting is really an erasing of the card catalog and not a
thorough formatting at all, what on earth was Sony thinking when they
wrote that? For the answer, let’s think back to the ancient Apple vs. IBM
wars of the early 1980s. Even before the Macintosh was introduced, Apple
always had their own proprietary format for floppy disks. So even if the
floppy disk was physically the same, if it was written to on an Apple, it
could not be read by an IBM PC. This was still true when the Mac was
invented, although Apple did go out of their way to make sure that their
machines could read IBM floppies if they were inserted. (A technically
difficult task, since the two machines would require different mechanical
spin rates at different times.)
Today, there are still many different competing proprietary formats used by
Apple, Linux, and Microsoft, and when you format a memory card in those

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