SD card suddenly unreadable and looks empty, device insists on formatting?

[u/Kindly-Plate9884]

I was trying to recover pictures from a really old (10 years old..) SD card with really precious pictures, when suddenly mid transfer my computer gives me a warning that says "offline/empty disc" and the phone i had the SD card in suddenly cant detect it anymore. dont have any other phone with me where i can test whether the SD card is still readable or not, and i dont really have the resources currently to go to a data recovery person. How can i make sure the card isnt dead (hopefully)? It happened so suddenly, and i did transfer a significant amount of pictures and videos already, albeit most of them being corrupted. There is no physical damage to the card as far as i can see, and i havent taken it out since the first time i found it and put it inside the phone. Any and every help is appreciated and please explain what i should do as if im a 5 year old......the card is ttec microsd 16gb (an ancient looking thing)

[u/vodoun]

unfortunately it's kind of difficult to give you advice about this that's going to be helpful without physically seeing that card because there could be a number of things wrong with it

it could be an actual physical issue with the card, maybe some of the connections are corroded or there was some other type of physical damage

or it could be that you removed it without unmounting it first and for older tech that can cause corruption

it really sucks but your best bet is actually taking it to a data recovery place, if the pictures are important

if you can't do that right now, the best way to preserve existing information is to just leave the card as it is for now because everytime you try to move something on it, it makes it harder for already existing data to be recovered